Gross Me Out

Gross! Yuck! Ewww! This is music to a booktalker’s ears. If you want your audience to make these sounds—and you want them to think you’re an incredibly cool person—build a collection of books about disgusting things.

Glen Murphy, a science museum educational presenter, understands kids’ yen for things icky. His Why Is Snot Green?: And Other Extremely Important Questions (and Answers) (Roaring Brook, 2009) is un-put-down-able. For example, do animals fart like people do? Of course. Anything that digests farts, because it is an important part of the whole process. But Murphy gives us a list of the top 10 animals that fart—in order of stinkiness! At the top of the list is the termite. Size doesn’t matter in the world of odor.

Another question in Murphy’s book: Why do we walk on two legs instead of four? Nobody’s really sure, although there are tons of theories. Read some of them to your booktalk audience and have them vote on the best answer.

Speaking of farts, and kids often do, Kathleen Krull and Paul Brewer’s Fartiste (S & S, 2008) relates an unbelievable but true story concerning what Herman Melville termed “wind astern.” More than 150 years ago in southern France, a young boy named Joseph Pujol loved to go swimming in the ocean. One day, in the water, he realized he had a unique talent. When he breathed in air and expelled it down below, he could imitate gunshots!

As an adult, Pujol performed as a clown. He soon realized he could make more money if he relied more heavily on his natural, gaseous talents. Soon he was making, uh, chamber music in concert halls. La Marseillaise, anyone? Presidents, royalty, and even Sigmund Freud came to see him. Nurses stood in the aisles to help anyone who fainted with laughter. This book is hysterical.

Sandy Donovan’s Hawk & Drool: Gross Stuff in Your Mouth (Millbrook, 2009) informs us that our mouths are literally full of things that seem disgusting. Maybe not your own, but think of other people’s mouths. Drool? “A typical mouth makes enough saliva in one day to fill about six cans of soda, each day, every day. And guess what? You swallow almost all of that spit!” Teeth? The enamel on them is the hardest part of our body. Look at the photo of a one-inch canker sore. Absolutely gross. This book is part of the “Gross Body Science” series.

Elizabeth Raum’s The Story Behind Toilets (True Stories) (Heinemann, 2009) is another crowd-pleaser. Long ago, before humans lived in towns, people simply used the great outdoors as their own personal facilities. But once they grouped together in villages and cities, proper disposal of waste became a problem. By the time of ancient Rome, sewer systems were developed. Look at the picture of the 12-man toilet on page seven—it was used in what is now Tunisia.

Some people used chamber pots, which they either sat on directly or were fitted to the bottom of chairs designed for that purpose. Look at the elaborate chamber pot with the picture of a man’s face on it on page eight. It was made in the 1770s in colonial America, and the face belongs to King George III of England. Now we know what the patriots really thought of the king!

Raum tells us that we can take tours of the sewers of Paris. That toilet paper was first sold in the U.S. in 1857. And that a man in Korea built his home to look like a giant toilet. Do you know about dual-flush toilets or the kind of toilets they use in space? Your kids will have a lot of fun finding out.

To put the polishing touch to the end of your talk, read the poem “Lavatory Crocodile’ in Judy Sierra’s Beastly Rhymes to Read After Dark (Random, 2008). Your kids will scream “ewwwww” and “gross!” In other words, they’ll love you forever.