Earthly Materials
Journeys Through Our Bodies' Emissions, Excretions, and Disintegrations
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
An “UNEXPECTEDLY PROFOUND,” “DEEPLY STRANGE,” and “UTTERLY UNIQUE tour of the human body” (Publishers Weekly)
"A must read for anyone who’s ever been amazed or aghast at what just came out." — Rachel Yoder, author of Nightbitch
To live, our bodies must continuously shed materials. Stop urinating, stop defecating, stop expelling breath, and death is near. While we often think of these materials as embarrassing waste products, they serve far more complex functions. The color of our mucus, the volume of our flatus, the rhythm of our breath: taken together, these materials tell a story of the human that produced them. Moreover, the exchange, elimination, and frequent disguise of our effluence has been elemental to the development of human civilization, and our lives today are still governed by a host of laws and superstitions and social mores about the materials our bodies leave behind.
In each of twelve discrete chapters, Earthly Materials tells a story about one of the materials the human body sheds—from breath and urine to vomit and tears. Sometimes the questions examined are historical: What have we physically done with all the urine produced in our cities? Sometimes they approach the matter through a philosophical lens: Is it ever logical to cry? Sometimes they explore recent scientific discoveries: How is mucus forcing us to reconsider our understanding of natural selection? But they always offer a window into how we negotiate our place in the world and how we get along with one another. Cutter Wood's delightfully weird, richly informative, and unexpectedly poetic tour of our bodily excretions uncovers extraordinary truths about ourselves--and the human story.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Wood (Love and Death in the Sunshine State) delivers an offbeat examination of blood, milk, semen, and other products of the human body. He delves into the biological functions of each, describing, for instance, how mucus in the gut protects bacterial diversity by providing sugars to microorganisms "in such a way that their more virulent functions are suppressed," ensuring no strain eliminates the others. Other sections focus on how secretions interact with society. For instance, he details the case of a Florida mother who was arrested on racketeering charges for illegally reselling formula sourced through a federal welfare program for low-income mothers, suggesting that the considerable demand for formula that fueled her grift stems from inhospitable workplaces that make it difficult to hold a job while breastfeeding. Elsewhere, Wood contends that individuals who solicit advice from Reddit on how to masturbate less are really seeking to feel more in control of their lives, and that disagreements over whether to exhibit human hair collected by Nazis at Auschwitz testifies to how hair is often used to represent personhood. With a flair for storytelling, Wood pulls unexpectedly profound insights from deeply strange anecdotes. The result is an utterly unique tour of the human body. Photos.
