What Civilization Owes to Scatology

It all began with the toilet—or thereabouts. In 1996, Robson Books, an English publisher, released The Porcelain God: A Social History of the Toilet, and very soon after, the book world was flooded—clogged, overflowing—with new titles in this popular, peculiar new genre. You see them everywhere now, books in which some distinguished historian focuses on one small aspect of our lives (like toilets or corsets or intoxication) and searches out the intimacies and nuances of its history, producing, in effect, a revised (if insanely eccentric) history of the world from a strikingly narrow perspective. Last year's wildly popular Salt, by Mark Kurlansky, comes to mind—a history of time told from sodium's point of view. The way some of these books are written, you think: Well, thank god for the invention of buttons or we'd still be hunter-gatherers. This week, we've exerted some judgment, sparing you from the likes of A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China, and now bring you our survey of some apparently vital new works of history, plus a handful of highlights from years past—including, of course, the toilet book. Enjoy.—Eds.

Out of It: A Cultural History of Intoxication

by Stuart Walton

(Harmony Books, $24)

To the previously known human instincts —eat, procreate, learn language—we may now add a fourth: the urge to get shit-faced. And British journalist Stuart Walton's all for it: "Far from seeing [the continued rise in the use of illegal drugs] as a troubling symptom of social breakdown, I consider it a heartening and positive phenomenon." Intoxicants, you may or may not be surprised to learn, have played a large part in human history, evincing a "boundless persistence in all human cultures throughout time"—with the exception of the Inuit, who, he says, "were the only culture not able to grow anything." (That innocence ended, big-time, when the European settlers showed up with liquor.) Walton is hilariously well-versed in wine terminology, and his wit is deliciously dry, as when he notes that "the Inca people administered [cocaine] to their human sacrifices as a final tender mercy before their chests were hewn open and their hearts removed." Walton claims intoxication singularly drove the course of human civilization. He quotes anthropologists who assert, for example, that hallucinogenic 'shrooms may have catalyzed our uniquely human brain structure and that agriculture was invented not to grow food but to grow dope. Despite his contempt for hippie romanticism, Walton's own celebration of alcohol and other drugs as a means of "personal advancement" isn't a lot more interesting than that of your average acid casualty, and his book suffers from excessively long harangues against Pecksniffian prigs and temperance types who, he claims, are still trying to ruin our fun. Judging by the latest Coors ads, they're not getting very far. Intoxication looks fit to drive human evolution for generations to come.

Mark D. Fefer

The New Taste of Chocolate: A Cultural and Natural History of Cacao With Recipes

by Maricel E. Presilla

(Ten Speed Press, $29.95)

For all its sexiness, chocolate sure comes from homely sources. Cacao, the fruit that chocolate is made from, grows on trees in long, bulbous, warty, gourdlike pods. They're flesh colored, and not unlike gigantic, drooping scrota. Mariel E. Presilla is obsessed with them. She's written 198 glossy pages on all you ever wanted to know (and so much more) about chocolate—on cacao's source (Central and South Americas and the Caribbean, precisely within 20 degrees of the equator); on its introduction to Mexico and the North (by the end of the first millennium B.C.); on the people behind cacao farming (such as her own family, back in Cuba); on the origin of hot chocolate (spicy, not sweet) and its introduction to Europe (17th century, in Spain); and on the genetics of cacao, which are as dull as they sound. In short, Presilla's book is too long and too technical, even for a chocolate lover (unless, perhaps, you're a science lover, too). The best parts are the practical sections—one on tasting and choosing chocolate, with notes on color, aroma, and taste; and 50 pages of imaginative chocolate recipes including one for deep chocolate torte and one for princess pudding, both from Seattle's own Fran Bigelow, of Fran's Chocolates. If only she'd divulge her recipe for cabernet truffles.

Katie Millbauer

Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism by Steven Connor

(Oxford University Press, $35)

"Who are you calling a dummy?" Hackneyed routines that inevitably include some variation on that line have cemented ventriloquism's lowly status among the arts. But, as this book suggests, ventriloquism has endured as a popular entertainment in some form for thousands of years, making it a suitable, if odd, subject for serious scholarship. The rigor with which Mr. Connor applies his faculties in Dumbstruck is impressive, but it's too much: The intellectual commitment he requires is likely to outstrip the curiosity of all but a few. (You should also know that there's nary a mention of the genius Willie Tyler and his lap buddy, Lester.) While it's interesting that the legendary duo of Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy first achieved their fame on the radio—doesn't that defeat the spectacle?—it's far less rewarding to consider that "just as ventriloquism depends upon the insufficiency of sound and the adjustment of sound by sight, so a ventriloquial structure is at work in the larger adjustments of sound, sight, and other senses." I'm intrigued to learn that the single-dummy model of ventriloquism didn't become the standard until recently, but less enthralled that "the late nineteenth-century ventriloquist began more and more to speak in propria persona. The interest shifted from the 'multiformical' and 'ubiquitarial' transformations of a single character to the narrower and subtler ironies of the relation between the ventriloquist and his interlocutor." Maybe the dummy, in this case, is me.