Rating: 
Summary: Rude and not funny
Review: The author is rude and crude and tries to be funny in a sort of smug way. She assumes you will laugh at her "insights." These are mere invasions of privacy that would make anyone with a maid or house cleaner shudder. The author thinks these invasions of privacy are funny. They aren't. Don't get this book!
Rating: 
Summary: Not for Everyone
Review: Okay, so Rafkin's book is not for everyone. What's new? My recommendation is to read the first chapter before you buy this book. I did, and I was hooked immediately. Every chapter was a surprise after that as Rafkin shows how she makes a living doing the work she loves -- work that obviously other people find disgusting, boring, painstaking, or just too lower class. The joy is that Rafkin does love her work and, yes, finds most things in life ironic, even 'other people's dirt.' As she discovers, you can learn everything you want to know about a person just by looking at what reading material they put out, what they put in their refrigerators, and what they store in their medicine cabinet. Do tell. Surprises abound, and if Rafkin occasionally appears condescending, maybe it has something to do with the way she is treated by her customers, who deserve to be scaled for their haughty attitudes. The last chapter, which takes place in Japan where housecleaning and Zen join hands, is humbling, honest, and original. I imagine the same people who find Rafkin's take on housecleaning to be repulsive are the same people who think retarded people should be locked indoors and out of sight. But that's another book....
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Summary: Offensive
Review: The author seems intent on insulting everyone around her, and puts herself above them. Her behavior is so often offensive that even her witty, breezy style cannot make up for it.
Rating: 
Summary: About the Author
Review: Louise Rafkin earned her B.A. in English from Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, and her M.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1981. When she is not cleaning houses all over the world or practicing martial arts, Louise Rafkin is writing--fiction, non-fiction, essays, and reviews. She has contributed to numerous magazines, including: "Ladies' Home Journal," "New York Times Magazine," "Boston Phoenix," and "OUT." Her work has appeared in many other publications, including: "The Bay Guardian," "Poets & Writers," "Women's Review of Books," and "Whole Earth Review."Rafkin has published several books, some of which include: "Different Mothers" (Cleis Press, 1990), "Street Smarts: A Woman's Guide to Personal Safety" (Harper SF, 1995), "The Tiger's Eye, The Bird's Fist: A Beginner's Guide to the Martial Arts" (! Little, Brown, 1997), and "What Do Dogs Dream?" (Andrews and Mcmeel, 1998). In the past several years, Louise Rafkin has received plenty of awards and recognition for her writing. She has won the San Francisco Cable Car Award for Best Local Writing in 1989, first place in the San Francisco "Bay Guardian"'s fiction competition in 1989, and a Lambda Literary Award in 1991. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Zimtbaum Foundation Fine Arts Work Center, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and a grant from the Ludwig/Vogelstein Foundation. Rafkin and her partner Susie live in Berkeley, California. "Other People's Dirt" is her first book with Algonquin.
Rating:
Summary: The untidy business of life...
Review: Louise Rafkin never imagined she'd end up cleaning refrigerators or having a preference for a particular brand of paper towels. But what started out as a quick way to earn a living became a curious preoccupation with all things clean...and messy. Witty and revealing, Other People's Dirt is a thoroughly irreverent look at the untidy business of life. Other People's Dirt has been optioned for a feature film and is both a Book-of-the-Month Club and the Quality Paperback Book Club selection.
Rating:
Summary: A brilliantly insightful, provocative and visceral read
Review: Rafkin's memoir took me on a roller coaster ride of emotion. From tears of laughter, "I nickmaned this couple the Shedders, because from the evidence in the bathroom, they had to be losing fistfuls of hair on a daily basis", to deeply saddened by the class issues she reveals in the chapter entitled 'McCleaning', cringing at the the thought of 'vacuuming maggots' from a crime scene, to a truly poignant moment making the bed with the husband of a client recently hospitialized with terminal cancer. Ultimately, she ties the whole thing together with what is presumably her own spiritual epiphany of returning to her native west coast to 'clean up' her own mess. This is a smart book
Rating: 
Summary: A smug harangue
Review: I took an intense dislike to her smugness and across-the-board disdain of her clients. She seems to despise all of them, unknown as well as known. She scorns those whose homes are too clean and those whose homes are too dirty; those who won't stay to talk and those who do stay around, presumably because they don't trust her (she doesn't consider it a violation of trust to watch TV, make phone calls, have sex on their bed, and "spy" (her words) on them. Even other cleaners don't escape her mocking. The writing style is breezy and reads quickly. Is it a good book? It does reveal who she is, and in that way succeeds as a kind of memoir. But I wouldn't read anything by Rafkin again.
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Summary: NY OBSERVER LOVED IT!
Review: "An amusing, touching memoir. Think: Female Don Quixote in the cleaning products aisle..." --NY Observer 5/18/98
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Summary: An "A" from Entertainment Weekly...
Review: "Cleaning was never so steeped in meaning as it is in Rafkin's scintillating reflections on her profession of the past eight years. She reveals what objects on a bedside table say about a marriage (dueling remotes, a bad sign) and tells all after being fired for leaving two Cheerios in the sink. She joins a Japanese cleaning commune, visits a Messies Anonymous meeting and interviews various "exotic" housecleaners, a woman who cleaned for the Hearsts and Rockefellers, and an expert in scrubbing up crime scenes (who recommends vaccuming, not wiping maggots). Rafkin delivers the dirt on cleaning with investigative zeal and remarkable depth." -- Entertainment Weekly 5/22/98
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting topic; tiresome attitude
Review: Although the notion of life as seen by a housecleaner is interesting--how much do our homes reveal about our "secrets"?--and the style is mildly entertaining, the chip on the author's shoulder detracts from the book. An example--she freely admits that she "overcharges" a lot of clients for various services, but then counsels those who use housecleaners to leave little uplifting notes like "you're amazing!" She wants top pay *and* ego-stroking for doing her job? Nice work if you can get it. In one nearly repellant episode, while cleaning for a commercial service she considers exploitive, she notices that the home's owner has many books on his shelves about the exploitation of labor. Interrupting him as he works, she waves one of the titles at him and expects him to join her in a discussion of the plight of certain workers, especially those in the cleaning business. The poor man is, understandably, less than enthused at this prospect....he was hoping for clean floors; instead he's being harangued about social issues by some woman he's never seen before, one who's being paid to dust the books, not wave them at him. The book is breezy and mildly entertaining, but the author's attitude is tiresome, and her manners are appalling (inviting your boyfriend over to make use of a client's bed when no one is home, and then charging someone for the privilege?). It's enough to make you scrub your own bathroom.
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