Gee Whiz!: It's All About Pee (review)
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Extraordinary Ordinary People: Five American Masters of Traditional Arts
Having previously examined one kind of animal leavings in The Truth about Poop (BCCB 6/04), Goodman turns her attention to a more liquid excretion. In her usual chatty, pun-laden style and brief titled sections, she explains the biological necessity of pee, cultural and historical variations in toilet practices (with particular attention to solutions to difficult circumstances), urinary habits among other species, and the various uses to which humans have put urine. The tidbits are well chosen for maximum appeal or repellency, depending on one's reaction to the subject (kids will understand astronauts' resistance to hand-chipping frozen pee off the space shuttle's exterior and giggle at the use of pee as reindeer bait), and under the jaunty tone is a tacit implication that the current Western anti-pee taboo is a whim of cultural fashion more than anything else. Smith's compact, angular cartoons offer jocular interpretations of the historical and biological trivia, with occasional extremely silly but helpful diagrams. This is an obvious partner for The Truth about Poop, but it could also be read standing—or sitting—alone. The legendary quality of some of the tidbits makes the absence of specific notes particularly unfortunate, but an afterword describes the author's research and offers a few resources.
