Dirty minds: a whole new meaning

MELANIE LITTLE

THE DIRT ON CLEAN: An Unsanitized HistoryBy Katherine AshenburgKnopf, 358 pages, $35I live in Calgary, right now as good a place as any from which to contemplate the strange social beings we humans are. People persist in building houses with four bathrooms - at least in part, I assume, to help them stay clean - yet they think nothing of spending the day with the city's ubiquitous building-site grit coating their laser- whitened teeth. The guys from the worksites learn pretty quickly they'll have better luck if they doff their grimy coveralls before hitting the bars; the women who woo them, meanwhile, manage to smell, always, of shampoo, yet glow with spray-on tans suggestive of afternoons spent rolling around in big bowls of Cheezies.