Midas Dekkers - The Story Of Shit

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Badly flawed

I didn't like this book nearly as much as I had hoped to.  It's a genuinely interesting subject which, treated with real wit and the right tone can make a fascinating and readable book – as Richard Jones showed us in his excellent Call Of Nature.  As the style of the title here will tell you, Dekkers has written a rather different book.  New Scientist persuaded me to try this by saying that this "shows Dekkers once again to be in possession of a golden pen."  Well, maybe – but whatever his pen is made of, I wasn't keen on what he has written with it.

There are good things here.  Dekkers knows and has researched his subject, so there is a wealth of information on all sorts of aspects of defecation; the biological insights you'd expect, but also stuff about toilet paper, social aspects of toilet use, how defecating is treated in films and so on.  For me, though, this was swamped by the book's flaws.

One problem is  Dekkers's style which I found to be overblown and off-puttingly crude.  Obviously, this is not a delicate subject, and I can see that Dekkers is trying to break conventions and taboos – hence the deliberate coarseness of the title – but the book is so relentless in its use of crude language that it begins to grate, like a teenager setting out to annoy.  (This includes the c-word used as an anatomical descriptor, which, especially in a factual book from a male author, I find very questionable.)  Add to this a bombastic flow of sometimes very dodgy arguments and I really began to struggle.  Just as a single example:

"We still love with all our heart. That’s why we hate it so much when something goes wrong, and we’re willing to spend so much money to have our heart and blood vessels repaired. Heart surgeons and blood specialists share in the honour that accrues to their favourite organs.

Gastroenterologists gnash their teeth. They know that the only purpose of blood vessels is transport. Real life takes place in the intestines."

I'm afraid I find that plain silly.  We hate it so much when something goes wrong with our heart because it can kill us in short order – and then real life wouldn't be taking place in the intestines, would it?  Yes, the only purpose of blood vessels is transport, just as the only purpose of any vital organ is a small, specific but essential part of the complex processes of life – and that includes the intestines.  Dekkers asserts that "You are not your brain; you don’t love with your heart; and even the horniest man is more than his dick.  We are our intestines."  The first sentence is self-evidently true; the second is self-contradictory nonsense.  There was too much of this sort of stuff in the book for me to ignore.

So, not for me in either style or content.  The real and valuable science and analysis in the book were swamped by the flaws and I can't recommend it.

(My thanks to Text Publishing for an ARC via NetGalley.)