George Washington's False Teeth: An Unconventional Guide to the Eighteenth Century

As Princeton history professor Darnton notes in his introduction,""everything about the eighteenth century is strange, once you examine it in detail."" His pleasingly eccentric book of essays offers many surprising supporting examples. But this isn't a mere laundry list of oddities; Darnton is thoughtful and engaging in his historical analysis of the Enlightenment, and his narrative, in which he occasionally appears in the musing, professorial first person, will absorb the educated lay reader. In""The News in Paris,"" Darnton considers how news was disseminated in the city in 1750. It was not, he says, through newspapers,""because papers with news in them--news as we understand it today, about public affairs and prominent persons--did not exist. The government did not allow them."" He traces the complicated methods by which court gossip and political machinations spread throughout the Parisian populace, concluding that 21st-century Washington resembles 18th-century Paris in its focus on""political folklore"" and the private lives of leaders instead of the platforms they espouse. In""The Great Divide,"" Darnton records Rousseau's early picaresque adventures and then shows how the great philosopher (and""first anthropologist"") came to regard civilization as a""process of corruption,"" and later to champion a patriotic civil religion. Throughout, Darnton uses the 18th century to provide""historical perspective to current questions""--about, for example, the shifting of European identity and the Internet's influence on information sharing--and openly ruminates about the problems of being a historian. This is a well-researched and sharply intelligent book, and Darnton is a knowledgeable and delightful guide to the time period. 17 b&w illustrations