{"id":5237,"date":"2010-01-11T06:00:28","date_gmt":"2010-01-11T12:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs2.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/?p=5237"},"modified":"2009-12-23T11:32:42","modified_gmt":"2009-12-23T17:32:42","slug":"a-mans-guide-to-ironing-dusting-and-other-household-arts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/a-mans-guide-to-ironing-dusting-and-other-household-arts\/","title":{"rendered":"“A Man’s Guide to Ironing, Dusting and Other Household Arts”"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s Clean and Tidy Week at the Davenport Library Info Cafe blog! Over the next five days Lynn will tell us about some great books that will inspire you to organize, straighten and scrub and otherwise make you into a finer human being. She starts us off with a bang with a book that not only is useful, it’s funny!<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\"How<\/a><\/p>\n

Andrew Martin’s eccentricity, English wit and\u00a0 male point-of-\u00a0view and his eye for the odd historical detail make laundry, ironing and “washing up” funny and (somewhat) inspiring in How to Get Things Really Flat<\/a><\/em><\/strong>. Martin casts himself as the bumbling amateur when he interviews experts on topics such as\u00a0vacuuming and dishwashers.<\/p>\n

The targeted audience\u00a0are English “blokes” who should be doing housework, but women will find it informative and funny. His footnotes are tongue-in-cheek factoids\u00a0that are\u00a0 useful for American readers. For example, he lets\u00a0us know that a pram is “short for peramulator, bigger and generally more heavy-duty than a stroller, since the baby lies flat. Any man pushing one is halfway to wearing a dress, or so he thinks.”<\/p>\n

He is interested in the sociological aspect of housekeeping , with sections on “How Much Do Women Know About Housework?” (the primary subject being his long-suffering wife).<\/p>\n

If you’ve overdosed on straight-forward, “how-to” books,\u00a0try this\u00a0unique addition to the\u00a0 homemaking ouevre.\u00a0In this work,\u00a0previously unanalysed tasks are viewed\u00a0through a slightly sqewed anthropolical lens combined with a Bill Bryson sensibility.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s Clean and Tidy Week at the Davenport Library Info Cafe blog! Over the next five days Lynn will tell us about some great books that will inspire you to organize, straighten and scrub and otherwise make you into a finer human being. She starts us off with a bang[Read more]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10,1],"tags":[981,979,938,937,980],"class_list":["post-5237","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-reference","tag-british","tag-cleaning","tag-housekeeping","tag-housework","tag-ironing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pd0CXx-1mt","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5237","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5237"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5237\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5477,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5237\/revisions\/5477"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5237"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5237"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5237"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}