“Clean and Decent,” says the author’s preface, “is meant to entertain even is scholarship does keep breaking through.”  To the American publishers this is traditional British understatement since, in addition to being vastly entertaining, the book is also continuously fascinating and frequesntly astonishing.  On the one hand an extraordinary history of personal hygiene down the ages (with special emphasis on the outré, the quaint, and the politely scatalogical), it also contains a solid core of social history and innumberable lively reflections on changing manners.It is apparent to Lawrence Wright that more can be learned about past peoples from their bathrooms than from their battlefields.  To make his point he provides hundreds of illustrations, prints and photographs, many of them rediscovered “bygones” that have never before been reprinted.  Thus one learns that Queen Elizabeth I has a valve watercloset; that Louis XIV had cushions in his bath; that baths have been concealed in sofas and washbasins in pianos; that, although whiskey may be added to bath water, mutton chops should definitely not be eaten in the bath proper.  Clean and Decent is a serious architect’s distinctive contribution to his profession.  It will also add considerably to the gaiety of nations.