“Defecating is reserved for private whispers (if it’s talked about at all), and the results are furtively flushed away as if a crime had been committed.”

The Story of Shit is a non-fiction book by Dutch author and biologist, Midas Dekkers. As the title suggests, Dekkers has indeed written a book about an item and an act, mention of which is generally avoided in polite company. Dekkers explores historical attitudes to shit, and those of the present day: “Any excrement encountered outside the body, like spit outside the mouth or extra-nasal snot, is a fugitive, illegal, on the run, bent on our destruction.” He looks at where we do our business and how the stuff is formed. He waxes lyrical about the look, shape, dimensions, smell and consistency of it (for probably far longer than is necessary). Sausages inevitably enter the narrative, along with sex and farts and faecal transplants and toilet training.

Dekkers talks about the value of shit, both commercial and environmental. He describes the ideal dimensions of a water closet. About toilet paper, Dekkers describes earlier alternatives, including Francois Rabelais’s preferred method: “…there is none in the world comparable to the neck of a goose, that is well downed, if you hold her head betwixt your legs. And believe me therein upon mine honour, for you will thereby feel in your nockhole a most wonderful pleasure, both in regard of the softness of the said down and of the temperate heat of the goose, which is easily communicated to the bum-gut and the rest of the inwards, in so far as to come even to the regions of the heart and brains.”

The book is rather clever with many laugh-out-loud observations on human (and animal) behaviour but occasionally there are flaws in some of the examples. In talking about animals required to be virtually independent when they leave the womb, the example of the foal standing on its legs works, but the duckling having to swim, not quite. And in the transformation of matter from food into person, the cheese in this example does not eat the cow: “How do you make a lion from a lamb? A good question for a zoo director. Lions are more popular with the public than lambs. Fortunately, the solution is simple: put the lamb near the lion. In no time at all the lamb will have become a lion. That’s how you make cats from mice, mice from cheese, cheese from cows and cows from grass.” Also, burping is not borborygmus.

While his explanations sometimes simplify at the expense of accuracy, Dekkers does provide fourteen pages of bibliography and a comprehensive nine-page index. Flawlessly translated from Dutch by Nancy Forest-Flier, this book is quite interesting, often funny and definitely irreverent.