Cathedrals of the Flesh: My Search for the Perfect Bath Book

A sensual tour of the world's great bathing cultures.

People journey to Greece for the ruins, Turkey for the Haghia Sophia, and Russia for St. Basil's, but Alexia Brue travels with a different itinerary: to visit the baths. What starts off as an innocent vacation quickly becomes an obsession, as the author ventures to Turkey, Greece, Russia, Finland, and Japan to sample the range of spa cultures and bathing traditions the world has to offer.

Caught up in the tide of exploration and crossing paths with fellow travelers along the way, Alexia drifts further and further away from the life she left behind in New York City. Hoping to find a thriving local bath scene, she dips into hamams, banyas, saunas, and onsen, finding both disappointment and bliss.

At once deeply personal and highly informative, full of intimacies, discoveries, and unexpected twists, Cathedrals of the Flesh is the candid and playful account of one woman's determination to follow her passion, ultimately inspiring readers to do the same.

The New Yorker

This entertaining picaresque chronicles the author's mostly naked reconnaissance of the world's public baths, from cavernous marble Turkish hamams and smoky Helsinki saunas to militantly hot Moscow banyas and a New York bathhouse of dubious hygiene. Between fierce scrubbings and whippings with birch twigs, Brue stealthily observes her fellow-bathers: jaded Russians (commenting on the decline of banyas one says, "Stalin very bad man, so bad banyas"), fleshy Brooklynites discussing linoleum, and Romanian strippers who refuse to take off their swimsuits at a Japanese hot spring. Brue's depiction of herself as a bumbling innocent abroad isn't entirely believable, but her approach to other cultures is refreshingly humble, and her devotion to the pleasures of bathing with strangers makes a seductive case for "skinship," in which, naked together in the same water, "you do away with all the normal social barriers in life."