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Merde: Excursions in Scientific, Cultural, and Socio-Historical Coprology
Merde is an unusual (very unusual) and witty investigation into a subject you may always have wondered about--but didn't know quite what to ask.
History, biology, anthropology, culture, animal behavior--all of these are the real subjects of Merde. Why can some animals do it on the run, and others can't? Why does camel dung make good fires? What are the fascinating stories of the dung beetles?
Myths and legends, physical features, health and disease, uses for construction and as fertilizers--even nutritional values!--Ralph Lewin writes about them all in the most ingratiating and sophisticated and yet scientific way. Merde is also full of personal adventures and observations, as well as anecdotes and examples.
The scattered literature on this subject is voluminous, but until now no one has perused and compiled it all and given it a personal touch, so to speak. It will be hard not to talk about this treasure trove of a book after you've finished it--or perhaps even when you're in the middle of it.
History, biology, anthropology, culture, animal behavior--all of these are the real subjects of Merde. Why can some animals do it on the run, and others can't? Why does camel dung make good fires? What are the fascinating stories of the dung beetles?
Myths and legends, physical features, health and disease, uses for construction and as fertilizers--even nutritional values!--Ralph Lewin writes about them all in the most ingratiating and sophisticated and yet scientific way. Merde is also full of personal adventures and observations, as well as anecdotes and examples.
The scattered literature on this subject is voluminous, but until now no one has perused and compiled it all and given it a personal touch, so to speak. It will be hard not to talk about this treasure trove of a book after you've finished it--or perhaps even when you're in the middle of it.
- GenresScienceNonfiction
208 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1999
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
July 7, 2025
A delightful little book (about 4"x8", 187 pages) that the enterprising (or constipated) reader may be able to complete in one sitting.
An irresistible Index:
Anchovies
Badgers, toilets of
Corncobs, as toilet paper
Dung rolling
Epilepsy, peacock feces as cure for
Farts, combustibility of
Hitler, Adolf
Prairie dogs, feces shapes in
Red meat, effect of, on feces color
Virgins, excreta of
Ralph Lewin, a professor of marine biology at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, proves again and again that he is a man who really knows his shit. There are chapters entitled "Physical Features: Shapes and Sizes;" "Colors and Textures;" "Smells and Other Chemical Components, Including Gases;" "Toilet Papers and Other Abstergents:" "Nutritional Values:" and, one of dozens of instances of his puckish humor, "Myths, Legends, and Holy Ordures."
This man is the Linnaeus of turds:
Turds may be single (hares), composite with faceted segments (sheep), or clumped (rabbits, pigs, and pronghorns). They may be more or less spherical (hares and their ilk): flattened or even concave at one end, where a harder pellet has pressed against a softer one before deposition (elk, fallow deer): oblong, cigar-shaped, cylindrical (goats), or even coiled (foxes): terete, grooved longitudinally (coypu) or transversely (zebras); segmented or joined in chains like short rosaries (porcupines, ground squirrels): blunt; pointed (duiker antelopes): tapered or tailed at the back end (prairie dogs, toads) or at both ends (weasels); dry or squishy, all according to species, age, season and diet.
He goes on to mention other books that provide instructions on how to collect, handle, photograph, dry, and varnish turds for a permanent collection. Just in case Antiques Roadshow is coming to town, I guess.
I'll just alight on a few major topics:
Size
- Turds are typically scaled to the animal producing them, with the exception of llamas, whose pellets are no bigger than those of rabbits.
Composition
- Desert animals have to conserve as much water as possible. They can't afford to waste it in excrements. Dry climates produce dry vegetation, and thus hard, dry scats. Camel droppings are often so dry that they are combustible as soon as dropped.
- Humans excrete between 20 and 1,500 grams of feces daily (Europeans fall in the range of 100 to 200 grams--another instance, I suspect, of Americans producing more waste than any other country). Healthy human feces are normally about 80% water. Less than 50% would indicate extreme constipation, over 90% diarrhea. These are not unimportant data; armies have to make appropriate calculations and logistical arrangements.
- Some human excrements, especially from avid bean eaters, incorporate so much gas that, like beaver droppings, they float. This causes complications in operating the settling tanks of sewage plants.
Synthetic Turds
- The Consumers Union, in order to evaluate the flushing efficiency of different toilet models, created synthetic turds from a mixture of sawdust, flour, shortening, and just enough hollow plastic beads to confer a slight degree of buoyancy.
Gaseous Emissions
- 60 million tons of methane per year, or about 15% of the total annual production entering the earth's atmosphere, comes from cattle. Another 5% originates in the guts of termites and locusts.
Animal Latrines
- Llamas seem to designate special limited toilet areas where they drop thousands of little turds in a site 1-2 meters across. Sometimes they wait patiently to take their turns at the latrine areas. Hyraxes, rabbits and wildebeests also segregate their latrines. Gorillas in the wild, in contrast, tend to foul their arboreal nests. Badgers have been found to create two kinds of latrines, larger ones for feces with special anal smells that say "keep away," and smaller ones for casual excretions.
Selection of Mates
- Females of the black-footed salamander are said to select their mates partly by the texture and smell of their feces, which reveal the kinds of food that a nubile male is able to catch and eat, as indications of his levels of energy and predatory efficiency. Ladies, pay attention!
Espionage
- The plumbing system of a Norwegian hotel where Brezhnev once stayed had to be specially modified to enable secret agents to obtain the fecal data necessary for diagnostic purposes.
When to Eat Shit
Starving Aleuts and Inuits eat reindeer pellets. Coots may eat goose droppings. Seagulls indigenous to the Antarctic enjoy a diet of seal feces and afterbirths. Off the north coast of Siberia, phalaropes snack on walrus feces. Mole crickets enjoy the wholesome goodness of gopher tortoise droppings. Schools of hungry fish follow hippos and manatees, waiting to snap up the "sporadic benefices." There are some species of fish who loiter their whole lives around the cloaca of whale sharks in order to be first in line to snatch the yummy fecal morsels. Disgusting as this may sound, herbivorous fish that follow carnivorous species can considerably enrich their diet in this fashion.
We've all heard the saying "he thinks he shits ice cream" to describe someone who is particularly impressed with himself, but aphids do in fact have the sweetest anal excretions in nature, consisting mainly of a concentrated sugar solution. Ants go to a lot of trouble to corral and protect herds of aphids, which reciprocate for these attentions by providing liquid refreshment for their insect shepherds.
Some species gain sufficient nourishment via the process of refection, or munching their own poo. Rabbits produce a night-time feces through colonic sorting that is soft and black, consisting of partly digested grass and leaves. It is then nibbled straight from the anus as a kind of breakfast. Other refecating species are rats, mice, beavers, squirrels, guinea pigs, chinchillas, and lemurs. Recycled droppings may constitute up to 25% of some species' total diets. Laboratory rats, if not allowed to consume their own feces, may ultimately develop vitamin K and B12 deficiencies.
Conclusion
I was charmed by the author's purely scientific passages (and particularly taken with the phrases "tough mucus-coated lozenges of nestlings" and "juvenile pellets of the diminutive bushtits"), but Dr. Lewin's tendency to become chatty and raconteurish occasionally peeved me. One especially vexatious incidence was his retelling of a false email rumor about an elephant so successfully treated with a laxative that he violently expelled 100 kilograms of feces and suffocated his zookeeper.
August 12, 2009
This is a book about shit. It is a catalog of data gathered under headings such as Terminology and Cultural Attitudes, Physical Features: Shapes and Sizes, and Smells and Other Chemical Components, Including Gases. It is quasi-academic (Lewin is a professor of marine biology), with occasional attempts at humor. It is not as funny as I had expected, but there are nuggets (nougats?) scattered about; I’ll confine myself to repeating some of those I found most interesting and/or amusing.
*Quotations.
--“We remain students as long as we live, and don’t give a shit for the World.”
--Einstein
--“We produce our own fertilizer.”
--Henry Ford
--“I’m dropping [in the polls:] like a turd in a well.”
--Bill Clinton
--“Society needs manure more than mathematics.”
--Justus von Liebig (1840)
--“The human body is a sachell full of dung.”
--Bishop John Fisher (early 1500s)
--“Anal emissions may be loud but odorless, or silent but smelly.”
--Chinese Saying
--“…a major part of the ocean’s business [is:] converting wastes into living creatures…”
--John Isaacs
--Leonardo DaVinci pointed out that the only contribution to society of most people is to their local cesspit
*Words.
--Murphy’s Law in France: “La loi d’emmendement maximum.” [“The law of maximum shit.”:]
--Chinese for feces = “da-bien” (which means “big convenience”)
--Swahili for feces = “mavi”
--Esperanto for feces = feko (singular), fekoj (plural)
--“Poppycock” derives from a Dutch dialect word pappelcak, which means “soft dung”
--Deer droppings are called “fumets”
--Coprophagy = eating feces
--Caecotrophy = eating one’s own feces (constitutes up to 25% of the total diet of some species—such as rabbits, beavers and lemurs)
--Encopresis = repeatedly voiding in inappropriate places
--King James Bible metaphor for defecation = “covering one’s feet”
--Diarrhea = In Mexico, called “Montezuma’s revenge” and “La turista,” and in India, “Delhi belly.”
--Fossilized feces = “coprolites”
--Australian expression = “As rare as rocking horse shit.”
--Otter droppings = “spraints”
--Accumulated bird droppings = “mutes”
--Ordure in medieval England = “Gong”
--“A wintry period in December and January, when the ground in Western Canada is colder than usual, was (perhaps still is) designated by the Haida Indians as Kong Kyaangaas, or “stand-up-to-shit month.”
*Interesting Facts.
--When chimpanzees who know American Sign Language get frustrated, they often show the sign for feces
--“A cane toad has been filmed in Australia earnestly trying to copulate with a horse dropping.”
--People on liquid diets (for example, IVs) produce no turds
--In humans, it takes about 60 hours from food to feces (48 hours for heavy drinkers)
--Rabbits produce 500 pellets per day
--Elephants produce 6 to 30 kilos of crap every few hours
--Human flatulence consists primarily of methane and hydrogen. There’s normally 100 milliliters in the guts at any time, with 2-3 liters farted each day
--15% of all the methane in the atmosphere is produced by cattle farts; the Australian government is thinking of taxing these gaseous emissions
--5% of the methane in the atmosphere is produced by termites and locusts
--In hospitals there have been many methane explosions when doctors tried to cauterize colons
--“In the trees where they roost, fruit bats generally arrange themselves in a sort of hierarchy in which the dominant animals occupy the highest branches, thereby presumably obviating or at least reducing the frequency of fecal pellets falling on them.”
--First known toilet seat = ancient Egypt, 2700 B.C.
--First flush toilet = by Sir John Harrington in 1596
--Each day 230 million gallons of raw sewage are dumped into the Ganges River
--In Singapore, people are fined S $150 for not flushing the toilet
--“The plumbing system of a Norwegian hotel where Communist Party General Secretary Breshnev once stayed had to be specially modified, according to some reports, to enable secret agents to obtain the fecal data they felt they needed for diagnostic purposes.”
--Toilet paper has been manufactured with many designs: for example, with crossword puzzles, quotations, the odes of Horace, and passages of Beethoven symphonies
--Some Japanese toilet-paper dispensers are equipped with music boxes
--In the court of Louis XIV, women used wool or lace for toilet paper
--Human feces retain about 8% of the caloric value of the food ingested
--Chinese farmer’s comparison of feces produced: one Englishman equals three pigs or eight Portugese
--When very hungry, Aleuts and Inuits sometimes eat reindeer pellets
--“One marine biologist has devoted at least ten years of research in North Carolina largely to studies of copecod feces.”
--Logo of the New York Entomological Society: a dung beetle rolling a globe
--Dung beetles roll away a soft elephant dump within two hours
--“Males of certain species [of dung beetle:] may present prospective mates with small pellets as nuptial offerings.”
--“Some species [of dung beetle:] work in pairs, and in not a few cases one sex (guess which!) does the pushing while the other rides on top.”
--The English had a TV program called The Wonderful World of Dung
--“Some female koalas are so remiss in their personal hygiene that the mess in their pouches may accumulate until it suffocates their unfortunate offspring.”
--Bacteria borne by bird-poop: campylobacter (magpies), mycobacterium (starlings) and histoplasmosis
--Migrating ducks spread flu viruses around the globe
--Columbus and his crew had a daily ration of 2.5 liters of Spanish red wine
--St. Catherine of Sienna died of constipation
--Worldwide, diarrhea kills 3 million people a year
--Over 100 species of worm inhabit the human gastrointestinal tract
--“Humans of many races, notably the Masai, Dinka and Nuer tribes of Africa, use cattle dung as a mortarlike binding agent for their round wattle huts as well as for fuel.”
--Masai brides sometimes wear crowns of dung
--“Dung contributes a valuable addition to the mud used for flooring in much of rural India.”
--In rural India, dung provides up to 25% of the fuel (dung cakes are called “bricks of gold”—whereas in ancient Mexico real gold was called “God shit.”)
--“In the Netherlands, disposal of pig and cow manure has become such a problem that “the farmers have been known to include, among the desirable attributes of prospective spouses, the possession of requisite permits for pig-manure disposal.”
--Peru markets 100,000 tons per year of guano
--Dogs are forbidden in Reykjavik, Iceland and Beijing, China
--Hippocrates advocated using pigeon droppings to cure baldness
--Pliny the Elder prescribed peacock feces to cure fever and epilepsy
--In ancient Egypt, physicians advised their patients to treat soreness of the eyes with warm donkey droppings
--During inauguration, to ensure their good fortune the kings of Nepal were anointed with horse and elephant dung
--In Siena, Tuscany, horses are led into church before racing—it is considered good luck if one leaves an offering
--Orthodox Hindus say a special prayer before pooping; orthodox Jews after pooping; orthodox Muslims both before and after
--“A project to market lion droppings in the Netherlands, to be distributed as a deterrent to the invasion of gardens by neighborhood cats, proved unsuccessful, perhaps because Dutch cats are as a rule unaware of the size and ferocity of their feline cousins in Africa.”
*Myths and Legends.
--“The farts of a mythical beast, the bonnacon (which may have resembled a large goat), were reputed to smell so foul that they not only repelled pursuing predators but even blasted vegetation.”
--The Winnebago Indians’ Great Magician blows up the whole of mankind with a single fart, and then covers the surface of the earth with the feces that follow it.
--“The wife of the Scottish poet Robert Burns was reputed to have had a special knack of throwing cow dung against the walls of buildings.”
--Old English superstition: horse hairs that drop onto cow patties develop into snakes.
--“I have heard of a resident of Westlake Hills, Texas, who formally petitioned his city council to allow him to keep a pet donkey at his home so that his children would grow up knowing what manure looks like.”
--The Buddha’s turds were said to glow in the dark
*Story. “There is a story about a donkey that, led on-stage perhaps to represent the rustic cavalry in a production of Mascagni’s opera Cavalleria Rusticana, defecated on the proscenium. The eminent conductor, Sir Thomas Beecham, stopped the performance at this point by tapping on the rostrum; he then turned to the audience and announced, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, a moment’s reverent silence, please. We are in the presence of a superior being: a critic.’”
*Quotations.
--“We remain students as long as we live, and don’t give a shit for the World.”
--Einstein
--“We produce our own fertilizer.”
--Henry Ford
--“I’m dropping [in the polls:] like a turd in a well.”
--Bill Clinton
--“Society needs manure more than mathematics.”
--Justus von Liebig (1840)
--“The human body is a sachell full of dung.”
--Bishop John Fisher (early 1500s)
--“Anal emissions may be loud but odorless, or silent but smelly.”
--Chinese Saying
--“…a major part of the ocean’s business [is:] converting wastes into living creatures…”
--John Isaacs
--Leonardo DaVinci pointed out that the only contribution to society of most people is to their local cesspit
*Words.
--Murphy’s Law in France: “La loi d’emmendement maximum.” [“The law of maximum shit.”:]
--Chinese for feces = “da-bien” (which means “big convenience”)
--Swahili for feces = “mavi”
--Esperanto for feces = feko (singular), fekoj (plural)
--“Poppycock” derives from a Dutch dialect word pappelcak, which means “soft dung”
--Deer droppings are called “fumets”
--Coprophagy = eating feces
--Caecotrophy = eating one’s own feces (constitutes up to 25% of the total diet of some species—such as rabbits, beavers and lemurs)
--Encopresis = repeatedly voiding in inappropriate places
--King James Bible metaphor for defecation = “covering one’s feet”
--Diarrhea = In Mexico, called “Montezuma’s revenge” and “La turista,” and in India, “Delhi belly.”
--Fossilized feces = “coprolites”
--Australian expression = “As rare as rocking horse shit.”
--Otter droppings = “spraints”
--Accumulated bird droppings = “mutes”
--Ordure in medieval England = “Gong”
--“A wintry period in December and January, when the ground in Western Canada is colder than usual, was (perhaps still is) designated by the Haida Indians as Kong Kyaangaas, or “stand-up-to-shit month.”
*Interesting Facts.
--When chimpanzees who know American Sign Language get frustrated, they often show the sign for feces
--“A cane toad has been filmed in Australia earnestly trying to copulate with a horse dropping.”
--People on liquid diets (for example, IVs) produce no turds
--In humans, it takes about 60 hours from food to feces (48 hours for heavy drinkers)
--Rabbits produce 500 pellets per day
--Elephants produce 6 to 30 kilos of crap every few hours
--Human flatulence consists primarily of methane and hydrogen. There’s normally 100 milliliters in the guts at any time, with 2-3 liters farted each day
--15% of all the methane in the atmosphere is produced by cattle farts; the Australian government is thinking of taxing these gaseous emissions
--5% of the methane in the atmosphere is produced by termites and locusts
--In hospitals there have been many methane explosions when doctors tried to cauterize colons
--“In the trees where they roost, fruit bats generally arrange themselves in a sort of hierarchy in which the dominant animals occupy the highest branches, thereby presumably obviating or at least reducing the frequency of fecal pellets falling on them.”
--First known toilet seat = ancient Egypt, 2700 B.C.
--First flush toilet = by Sir John Harrington in 1596
--Each day 230 million gallons of raw sewage are dumped into the Ganges River
--In Singapore, people are fined S $150 for not flushing the toilet
--“The plumbing system of a Norwegian hotel where Communist Party General Secretary Breshnev once stayed had to be specially modified, according to some reports, to enable secret agents to obtain the fecal data they felt they needed for diagnostic purposes.”
--Toilet paper has been manufactured with many designs: for example, with crossword puzzles, quotations, the odes of Horace, and passages of Beethoven symphonies
--Some Japanese toilet-paper dispensers are equipped with music boxes
--In the court of Louis XIV, women used wool or lace for toilet paper
--Human feces retain about 8% of the caloric value of the food ingested
--Chinese farmer’s comparison of feces produced: one Englishman equals three pigs or eight Portugese
--When very hungry, Aleuts and Inuits sometimes eat reindeer pellets
--“One marine biologist has devoted at least ten years of research in North Carolina largely to studies of copecod feces.”
--Logo of the New York Entomological Society: a dung beetle rolling a globe
--Dung beetles roll away a soft elephant dump within two hours
--“Males of certain species [of dung beetle:] may present prospective mates with small pellets as nuptial offerings.”
--“Some species [of dung beetle:] work in pairs, and in not a few cases one sex (guess which!) does the pushing while the other rides on top.”
--The English had a TV program called The Wonderful World of Dung
--“Some female koalas are so remiss in their personal hygiene that the mess in their pouches may accumulate until it suffocates their unfortunate offspring.”
--Bacteria borne by bird-poop: campylobacter (magpies), mycobacterium (starlings) and histoplasmosis
--Migrating ducks spread flu viruses around the globe
--Columbus and his crew had a daily ration of 2.5 liters of Spanish red wine
--St. Catherine of Sienna died of constipation
--Worldwide, diarrhea kills 3 million people a year
--Over 100 species of worm inhabit the human gastrointestinal tract
--“Humans of many races, notably the Masai, Dinka and Nuer tribes of Africa, use cattle dung as a mortarlike binding agent for their round wattle huts as well as for fuel.”
--Masai brides sometimes wear crowns of dung
--“Dung contributes a valuable addition to the mud used for flooring in much of rural India.”
--In rural India, dung provides up to 25% of the fuel (dung cakes are called “bricks of gold”—whereas in ancient Mexico real gold was called “God shit.”)
--“In the Netherlands, disposal of pig and cow manure has become such a problem that “the farmers have been known to include, among the desirable attributes of prospective spouses, the possession of requisite permits for pig-manure disposal.”
--Peru markets 100,000 tons per year of guano
--Dogs are forbidden in Reykjavik, Iceland and Beijing, China
--Hippocrates advocated using pigeon droppings to cure baldness
--Pliny the Elder prescribed peacock feces to cure fever and epilepsy
--In ancient Egypt, physicians advised their patients to treat soreness of the eyes with warm donkey droppings
--During inauguration, to ensure their good fortune the kings of Nepal were anointed with horse and elephant dung
--In Siena, Tuscany, horses are led into church before racing—it is considered good luck if one leaves an offering
--Orthodox Hindus say a special prayer before pooping; orthodox Jews after pooping; orthodox Muslims both before and after
--“A project to market lion droppings in the Netherlands, to be distributed as a deterrent to the invasion of gardens by neighborhood cats, proved unsuccessful, perhaps because Dutch cats are as a rule unaware of the size and ferocity of their feline cousins in Africa.”
*Myths and Legends.
--“The farts of a mythical beast, the bonnacon (which may have resembled a large goat), were reputed to smell so foul that they not only repelled pursuing predators but even blasted vegetation.”
--The Winnebago Indians’ Great Magician blows up the whole of mankind with a single fart, and then covers the surface of the earth with the feces that follow it.
--“The wife of the Scottish poet Robert Burns was reputed to have had a special knack of throwing cow dung against the walls of buildings.”
--Old English superstition: horse hairs that drop onto cow patties develop into snakes.
--“I have heard of a resident of Westlake Hills, Texas, who formally petitioned his city council to allow him to keep a pet donkey at his home so that his children would grow up knowing what manure looks like.”
--The Buddha’s turds were said to glow in the dark
*Story. “There is a story about a donkey that, led on-stage perhaps to represent the rustic cavalry in a production of Mascagni’s opera Cavalleria Rusticana, defecated on the proscenium. The eminent conductor, Sir Thomas Beecham, stopped the performance at this point by tapping on the rostrum; he then turned to the audience and announced, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, a moment’s reverent silence, please. We are in the presence of a superior being: a critic.’”
January 18, 2019
As rewarding as any book on this subject could possibly be, written with dry humor and real scientific interest. This was one of those chance finds at the bookshop; I read the first page or two and knew immediately it was coming home with me. But it’s not exactly the kind of book you recommend to all your friends. At least my kids will enjoy it.
I should add that the very extensive and detailed index is perhaps the most delightful thing about this book. Ralph Lewin obviously had great fun preparing it. In what other book, I ask, will you ever find references like these:
Elephant(s):
- ancient kings anointed by dung of, 145
- art materials made from dung of, 120-121
- constipation in, 106
- defecation frequency by, 17
- diet of, 33, 84
Or:
Vulture excreta:
- aimed at enemies, 24
- flowers resembling, 21
- nutritive value of, 80
- and regurgitation, 26
- self-fouling with, 53
Or even:
Roman Catholic novitiates:
- excreta of, 146
?
I should add that the very extensive and detailed index is perhaps the most delightful thing about this book. Ralph Lewin obviously had great fun preparing it. In what other book, I ask, will you ever find references like these:
Elephant(s):
- ancient kings anointed by dung of, 145
- art materials made from dung of, 120-121
- constipation in, 106
- defecation frequency by, 17
- diet of, 33, 84
Or:
Vulture excreta:
- aimed at enemies, 24
- flowers resembling, 21
- nutritive value of, 80
- and regurgitation, 26
- self-fouling with, 53
Or even:
Roman Catholic novitiates:
- excreta of, 146
?
November 3, 2025
Although it’s written as kind of a loose stream-of-consciousness grouping of factoids about poo and poo-adjacent topics, I really enjoyed “Merde.” It’s full of weird information from the entire zoological spectrum.
March 14, 2024
Droge opsomming van thematisch gerangschikte weetjes die dankzij de vele voetnoten wellicht dienst kan doen als naslagwerk of bron van flauwe grappen.
October 8, 2007
What will I take away from this book? For one, the fine distinction between scatology and coprology. That Pilobolus (also the dance troupe; http://www.pilobolus.com/about) is a dung fungus whose germinated spores are launched from the excrement in which they grow to incredible distances of up to six feet. Or that the German elephant trainer of email spam fame was really a myth and no one was suffocated by 100 kgs of poop when trying to ease the constipation of his charge.
Why does one of my dogs poop on the run and why can't the other ever resist fresh turd sur l'herbe? I picked up this book with these questions and others spinning about my mind. But, this book is mainly a mini encyclopedia of facts. The humor is restrained and the explainations are lacking. The subject of poop/scat/turd/shit/stool offers endless possibilities. Lewin handles the subject with rubber gloves, safety glasses, and a medical mask. It's like going in for the big one and coming out with a partial jettison and lingering disappointment for what could have been.
Why does one of my dogs poop on the run and why can't the other ever resist fresh turd sur l'herbe? I picked up this book with these questions and others spinning about my mind. But, this book is mainly a mini encyclopedia of facts. The humor is restrained and the explainations are lacking. The subject of poop/scat/turd/shit/stool offers endless possibilities. Lewin handles the subject with rubber gloves, safety glasses, and a medical mask. It's like going in for the big one and coming out with a partial jettison and lingering disappointment for what could have been.
August 21, 2012
It is what it says it is - a list, often breathless - as if the writer was in a dire need to relieve himself - of colours, textures, sizes, constitutions and assorted paraphenalia. It would have been interesting if it had some common thread other than excrement keeping it all together, but unfortunately, it lacks hundreds of commas, hyphens, semicolons and other punctuation marks that make it digestible.
On the other hand, if you are at a party that sucks and want to say something outrageously witty, you could pull the paperback out of your a**se pocket, where it fits snuggly, and open it on any page and just pick up a piece of information - did you know folks that a piece of dinosaur poop sold for 4.5K US$ at an auction in Utah? Would make you the party spirit in no time!
On the other hand, if you are at a party that sucks and want to say something outrageously witty, you could pull the paperback out of your a**se pocket, where it fits snuggly, and open it on any page and just pick up a piece of information - did you know folks that a piece of dinosaur poop sold for 4.5K US$ at an auction in Utah? Would make you the party spirit in no time!
December 6, 2007
Um, yeah, my Father sent this to me. Shows the depth of our relationship.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews