Salt: A World History

Rating:
Summary: Too Much Emphasis on Food
Review: Salt is one of the most important substances in the world. As Mark Kurlansky correctly states in "Salt : A World History", it is estimated that a person could live on nothing more than water and salt for nearly one month. However, this is about the only thing I found interesting about Kurlansky's effort.

Like most items of value, salt has been integral in the history of humanity. People have gone to great lengths and expended much energy in finding, gathering, making, using, selling, and protecting salt. For most of mankind's history, we didn't know exactly how ubiquitous salt was and so we even fought wars over it.

What Kurlansky most emphasizes in his book though is not the human drama played out over salt but the many ways it has been acquired and used. The most frustrating part of "Salt" is the number of ancient recipes that Kurlansky includes. A few representative ones would do no harm but Kurlansky seems to include one about every ten pages. It's enough to explain the number and variety of dishes salt was used in.

Also, Kurlansky seems fixated on which people did what first. It's one thing if you say that the Chinese developed a particular method first, it's another thing entirely if you keep repeating it throughout the book. To Kurlansky it seems that if you didn't do it first, then you didn't accomplish anything.

"Salt" would have been better with a healthier dose of such stories that Kurlansky does describe like the way Gandhi used disobedience to the British salt monopolies as a way to protest colonial rule. There are too few histories like that in "Salt: A World History".

Rating:
Summary: HUH?!?
Review: That is exactly what stumbled out of my mouth when I saw this book. With that cover art, maybe it is a humorous treatment of missle treaties? Turns out it is an excellent, if somewhat long (484 pages, illustrated) story of what one simple substance - NaCL - Sodium Chloride - good old table salt - has meant to mankind through several centuries. I admit to being a sucker for a good science book - and this is just eactly that. I would put Mark Kurlansky and this book in the same vein that Carl Sagan hooked me on Astronomy and James Burke's BBC series Connections could keep me spellbound with the intertwingling of it all. You may have seen his previous book - "Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World". If so, you know this author can take a somewhat commonplace object and weave a superior tale. (Pun intended.) Well this is essentially a short (cough) history of our race centered around salt. Did you know that Ghandi started his rebellion over a salt tax? Or that the slave trade was as dependent on the sale of salt as it was on rum and molasses? But this is not just a history. The author also lays out the health story on salt - both how it is used in the body as well as in the foods we eat. I recommend it to all my book-junky friends out there.

Rating:
Summary: A mountain of salt
Review: The information the author presents on this common material so important to biology, commerce and industry would have made an entertaining, informative book of a hundred pages or so. Unfortunately the real book has four hundred and forty-nine pages.

I never finished it.

Rating:
Summary: Beware of Inaccuracies?
Review: The part of this book with which I am most familiar professionally contains numerous errors of historical fact; if the author made this many mistakes in so few pages, how many other errors might he have made that I don't know about?

Rating:
Summary: Worth its salt to read
Review: The style of this book lends itself to a quick and interesting read. Its 450 or so pages of text will seem to breeze by. This book is clearly about salt, make no mistake about it. The author start out by giving you a brief tale of his personal fascination with salt. He clearly examines all cultures throughout time in terms of their relationship with salt. Salt certainly was a finding that enabled man to go further in their journies, and have something to trade that practically all societies needed.
I especially liked this book because it backed up its theories with facts and not just idle speculation. The book is well documented, and sprinkled with just the right amount of illustrations and pictures to make the chapter fill out properly. This book is definately written by someone that has a passionate interest in something we normally do not think twice about. After reading this book I can not look at a salt shaker in the same light anymore. If you love history, and want to take a journey through it via a different path, this is the ideal book for you.

Rating:
Summary: Worth its salt to read
Review: The style of this book lends itself to a quick and interesting read. Its 450 or so pages of text will seem to breeze by. This book is clearly about salt, make no mistake about it. The author start out by giving you a brief tale of his personal fascination with salt. He clearly examines all cultures throughout time in terms of their relationship with salt. Salt certainly was a finding that enabled man to go further in their journies, and have something to trade that practically all societies needed.
I especially liked this book because it backed up its theories with facts and not just idle speculation. The book is well documented, and sprinkled with just the right amount of illustrations and pictures to make the chapter fill out properly. This book is definately written by someone that has a passionate interest in something we normally do not think twice about. After reading this book I can not look at a salt shaker in the same light anymore. If you love history, and want to take a journey through it via a different path, this is the ideal book for you.

Rating:
Summary: How salt affected history
Review: This history of salt and how it changed the course of world history is up to the high standards of Mark Kurlansky. His research is thorough and his presentation is extremely readable.It would make a great gift for anyone interested in history, the evolution of world trade, the rise and fall of empires, and the cause of many wars.

Rating:
Summary: The Salt of the Earth
Review: This is a charming multicultural history of something we use every day but rarely think about. Mark Kurlansky traces the myriad uses of salt and the many ways salt is obtained from earliest China through Rome, the Middle Ages, and on into the present. Readers of his earlier works on codfish and the Basques will recover some familiar territory, but there's enough new material here to justify the return. As always, Kurlansky writes clearly and professionally, dropping the occasional witty aside or anecdote without compromising historical accuracy. The primary value of this work is its intercultural, intercontinental outlook, which helps us recognize that the world has been tied far more closely together for far longer than many of us realized.

Rating:
Summary: forget the pepper
Review: This was a Christmas gift, and no sooner had I started to read it when I couldn't stop. I discovered, to my entertainment and education, that salt definitely isn't just something you sprinkle on your salad, along with the pepper. (Did you know the word "salad" comes from the Latin for salt?)

Mark Kurlansky's telling of the story of salt, its huge role in world history, is spellbinding. He manages to get the awesome early history of China, with its advanced, non-western technology, told in the context of the search for salt. From China, to Egypt, to Roman conquests, to the Carribbean salt pans, to Ghandi's mission in India, to early industry in upstate New York, salt was a leader. And now I know why gourmet sea salt from Brittany is gray.

Salt is one of those products, along with hunting weapons, and the earliest grains, that has guided human destiny. That's not hyperbole. Read this wonderful book and find out why!

Rating:
Summary: Uncommonly gripping story of common salt
Review: Today it comes out of a salt shaker, but for thousands of years, salt has been at the center of the human struggle.

Kurlansky's latest --following COD, and THE BASQUE HISTORY OF THE WORLD--examines salt's role as the catalyst of economies, nations, culture, cuisine, and the development of science itself. Like his other books, this one is a terrific read, describing how salt went from the rarest and most valuable substance to the commonest. This is great stuff, and the way Kurlansky tells it is like eating potato chips: Bet you can't read just one chapter at a single sitting. I'm getting this one for my father.