ABOUT THE BOOK
We treat the customs of daily life as if they simply exist, the way weather does. They don't. Someone invented them — often by accident, sometimes for commercial reasons, occasionally for reasons that are frankly bizarre — and it calcified into "the way things have always been done."
This book tours twelve of those inventions: the French chef who rewrote dinner-table choreography, the teenage queen whose wedding gown accidentally launched a fashion tradition, the way nations as apparently permanent as Italy and Germany were willed into existence within living memory, and the strange, recent idea that people should marry for love at all.
Each chapter starts with a person, not an argument — an inventor, an eccentric, an accident of history — whose choices rippled outward until they looked like the natural order of things.
The Things We Take For Granted
A History of How the Radical Became the Ordinary
Why do brides wear white? Why does the year start in January? Nothing about your daily life was found — all of it was made, usually by someone with a very strange story.
“A fascinating, engaging and often surprising journey through the hidden histories of the everyday.”
