Foot: A Playful Biography

Geoff Hamilton, a former columnist for the Queen’s Journal, is a
Toronto-based freelance editor and writer.

Foot accurately describes itself as a “quirky, elegant compendium of
foot facts, fashion, and folklore.” Within its 100-plus glossy,
multicoloured pages, the book presents a diverse, idiosyncratic
selection of statistics, stories, and images relating to feet. Among the
topics touched on are the foot’s role in literature and culture; foot
care, hygiene, pathology, and physiology; and the history of shoes. The
lavish illustrations are visually stunning; on every page, one finds
some kind of representation of the foot in photographs, drawings, and
even X-rays.

The lighthearted discussion ranges from weighty claims about the
foot’s importance (“Feet came to symbolize sex and all our
ambivalent feelings about it”), to obscure but intriguing trivia
(“In November 2000, Rob Williams whipped up a bologna, cheese, and
salad sandwich, using only his feet, in 1 minute, 57 seconds, setting a
world record”), to the shoe preferences of contemporary pop-cultural
icon Sarah Jessica Parker. The Cinderella myth is discussed in some
detail and enduring foot legends from around the world are briefly
examined. There are liberal sprinklings of quotations relating to feet
from a hodgepodge of famous sources, including Shakespeare, Buddha, and
Christina Ricci. F. Scott Fitzgerald is identified as a foot fetishist,
Tolstoy as a shoe fetishist.

Vanderlinden writes in a whimsically eloquent style. Readers looking
for light entertainment and education need look no further than this
attractive, consistently delightful “biography of the foot.”