Clean: The Humble Art of Zen-Cleansing by Michael de Jong

With five simple, everyday products, you can have your home and all its contents gleaming. In his book, Clean: The Humble Art of Zen-Cleansing, Michael De Jong makes a compelling case for tossing out all those expensive, caustic cleaners you have under the sink. His philosophy—and he does have one—is that we have the power to reclaim the environment, put big business in its place, and make the world safe for our children and pets.

All we have to do is ignore the commercials that insist our homes aren’t clean unless we use powerful, chemical potions in colorful, shiny packaging and reach for more humble cleansers. Using his five favorite products: baking soda, borax, lemon, salt, and white vinegar, we can do everything from avoiding frozen pipes (that’s a box of salt poured down each drain) to preventing rust on scouring pads (that’s baking soda).

A small book, five inches by six inches 127 pages of large type, Clean can be read in less than thirty minutes, and used easily. De Jong includes an A to Z cleaning key with each of his five ingredients and page numbers along the top and every cleaning emergency from Air freshener (lemon and salt, page 118) to Yellowed cotton and linen (baking soda and salt, page 123). There’s not really a cleaning chore under the Z, but I do understand why he didn’t try to sell us an A to Y cleaning key.

De Jong sprinkles his Zen theories with history—the Egyptians used baking soda and salt in the embalming process and vinegar was being used to treat wounds in the battlefields as late as World War I. He claims he can help us find our spick and span center, mindfully and joyfully giving ourselves up to cleaning. I’m not so sure about that, but this is a clever and fun book, well worth that thirty minutes.