“An entertaining and informative book. The writing is clear and engaging. . . . Valerie Curtis’s extensive professional experience in the world of hygiene and disease prevention give a nice personal touch throughout, as she has at hand both grabby examples and anecdotes, as well as compelling public health reasons for why we ought to attend to disgust.”
— Daniel M. T. Fessler, University of California, Los Angeles
“Gross! Yuck! Ew! The psychology of disgust has turned into one of the hottest topics in the human sciences. It’s tied in surprising ways to health, nutrition, sex, evolution, even religion and morality. Valerie Curtis, one of the deepest thinkers and cleverest researchers on this part of human nature, turns revulsion into fascination.”
— Steven Pinker, author of How the Mind Works and The Better Angels of Our Nature
“Thanks to the recent development of evolutionary psychology, scientists understand disgust, its function, and its mechanisms as never before. Moving with ease across disciplines and from theory to arresting concrete examples, Valerie Curtis shares in this highly readable book the findings and questions this new science of disgust, to which she has been a main contributor.”
— Dan Sperber, French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, author of Relevance and Meaning
"Well-sourced and often witty, Don't Look delves into the science behind taboos and turned-up noses in occasionally stomach-churning but fascinating detail."
— Discover
“It is great fun (yucky things always are), and Curtis writes well, but there is a deeper purpose to this book: things that make you say ‘euw’ often (though not always) require vigilance because they may be harmful.”
— Toronto Star
“For a book riddled with rancid and revolting things, Don’t Look, Don’t Touch is surprisingly difficult to put down. . . . Perhaps the most illuminating aspect of Curtis’s book is the elegant parallel she draws between parasite avoidance and moral judgment, revealing how a mechanism for keeping us physically well could have led to our lip curling at bad manners, loutish behavior and the perpetrators of crime.”
— Times Literary Supplement
“Disgust, Curtis decided, must have been an adaptive mechanism to prevent humans from coming in contact with infection. As she argues in her short book, Don't Look, Don't Touch, Don't Eat, humans have evolved to be ‘disgustable.’”
— Guardian