Don’t Do It! A Dictionary of the Forbidden

Never, in a lifetime revolving around books, has your reviewer come across a dictionary of what you should and should not do throughout the whole gamut from social etiquette to downright illegality. Originally intended to be titled Taboos: A Dictionary to the Forbidden, this was thought unsatisfactory because “in our own society, that of the industrialized West, the word ‘taboo’ has lost almost all its magical and religious associations, it no longer has the idea essential to Margaret Mead’s definition as a prohibition whose infringement results in an automatic penalty without human or divine mediation”. This is due primarily,...