The Anatomy of Disgust: ,

Miller's book has secured one of those rare gifts: a perfectly realized cover. In a dark room, a large group of diners looks disapprovingly at the viewer. The one empty seat indicates that he or she once had a place at the table but is now excluded. The butler, too, is contemptuous, and only a small dog smiles-perhaps in recognition. Like humiliation (the subject and title of his earlier book), disgust, the author maintains, serves to order society, in the same way that some more studied motivators (such as greed) do. A professor at Michigan Law School, Miller mines history (particularly the Middle Ages), literature (particularly skaldic), Freud, Orwell and his own experiences as a parent of four young children to show the holes in Mary Douglas's theory that the disgusting is anomalous, something that doesn't fit (say, hair growing out of ears), and in Paul Rozin's argument that disgust resides in ""food rejection or in anxieties about our animal origins."" There's plenty of talk about unconscious desire and surfeit of the generative (fertile green ooze or a decaying body disgusts in a way a rock never can); but above all, Miller argues that disgust establishes rank. Lower plants are more disgusting to us (algae versus oaks), as are lower animals (slugs or cockroaches versus dolphins). And, of course, lower classes. Especially after the 18th century, disgust became more clearly bound up with class, bourgeois good taste and moral values. Miller's a fine, entertaining, self-deprecating writer who has created a book that, if not always appetizing, is still a tasteful examination of a strong emotion that is generally held at arm's length. (Mar.)