For an investigation of how we evacuate and what we do with the results, this is a remarkably clean book. It is not until page 240 of Barbara Penner's excellent Bathroom, that she quotes the 1970s English activist Graham Caine calling for a toilet that would ensure that 'one relates to one's own shit'. The style and the subject matter of this Eeaktion Books' 'Objekt Series' mimic each other. As Penner points out, bathrooms are about making us not know what we do in there. They are, she says, about 'flush and forget'. Still, this is not a book for the squeamish. No matter how polite and erudite the author is, it is hard to get through almost three hundred pages of descriptions of every sort of device and method of disposal without feeling as if you are spending too much time thinking about what we have been trained to ignore. Penner, in other words, works by an accumulation of examples rather than by forcing us to smell the opposite of the roses (though night soil is a good fertiliser).
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