Salt: A World History

This book topped of my gift of salt to perfection. The introduction is personal and fascinating; I couldn't stop reading. I gave the book away as part of my gift, so didn't get to read the whole thing. It was a great success.

overall this book became too boring to finish. Lots of material on various ways to prepare and cook various items with salt. Only sprinklings of other types of history. Gives an idea of the commercial historical importance of salt, but overall not a story told very well

Salt is one of those things that turned up all over the place in my high school studies. It turned up in chemisty (sodium chloride), in biology (the amount of salt in our bodies and what we do with it), in history and English (check out the root of the word: "salary"). So sure, salt's important. But does it merit its own entire book about its history? Turns out the answer is both yes and no...
I like these small, focused histories (as you've probably guessed if you've read any of the other reviews I've written). I've read many of them, including another one by Mark Kurlansky, Cod (which I rather enjoyed). So when I ran across Salt, I was certain I wanted to read it. I liked Kurlansky's style, and I already knew that the subject matter would be interesting.
And it was. In Salt, Kurlansky walks through both the history of salt and the influence of salt on history, presenting a wide and varied picture of one of the [now] most common elements in our modern world. And he does this in the same engaging fashion that he used in Cod; although, with fewer recipes. So why not give it five stars? Well, it has a couple of noticable flaws that tended to detract a bit from the overall presentation.
The first flaw was in the sheer number of historical snippets that were included. While I'm certain that salt has been important in the broad span of human history, there are a number of these historical anecdotes where he was clearly reaching to demonstrate the influence of salt. Salt may have been involved in these incidents, but it was peripheral at best, and the overall tone sounds too much like cheerleading. Cutting a few of these out would have shortened the book without detracting from the presentation at all.
The second flaw was the meandering path that he takes through the history of salt. He generally starts early in history, and his discussion moves along roughly as history does as well; however, he has a tendency to wander a bit both forward and backward without effectively tying all of this together. I'd have preferred to either walk straight through history while skipping around the world (effectively comparing the use and influence of salt around the world) or to have taken more time to discuss why we were rewinding (effectively following one thread to its conclusion and then picking up another parallel one). To me it made the presentation a little too choppy.
There have been other criticisms as well; for example, the chemistry is incorrect in a number of places, but if you're using this as a chemical reference, then you've got serious issues with your ability to library research. Of course, that begs the question of what errors are in there that we didn't catch. And it does tend to be a bit repetitive in parts; although, this could have been used to good effect if historical threads had been followed a bit more completely.
While I had a few dings on the book, overall I liked it. The fact that I read it end-to-end and enjoyed the last chapter as much as the first is a testament to my general enjoyment of it. It wasn't the best book I read last year, but I'll certainly keep it on my bookshelf. So, back to my original question: does salt merit its own book? Yes, it does, but perhaps in a somewhat shorter form.

Imagine someone gathered tomes of notes on salt, & then just shat them on to paper in no particular order. That's how this book reads, with plenty of offshoots into unrelated topics to add volume. You can also pick up the author's anti-goy snarks between the lines, right from the start. Absolute work to read through this stack of notes passed off as a book.

I generally really enjoy historical literature and with all the great reviews, I expected this book to be good. Quite the contrary--this book was terribly boring. I can't believe how many descriptions of brine there were, each explained in excrutiating detail. I stopped reading it after 100 pages since it didn't seem to have any hope of getting more interesting.

I had to read it for school over summer and the only reason it got one star is because I couldn't give it 0.
The book was atrocious. It took me 3 months to read when it took me a day to read a Harry Potter book.
Save yourself the pain and don't read it

John McPhee squared.
No fauna can live without it, and in human civilization, it has served far beyond the needs of diet; as preservative, as currency, as expression of wealth, as generator of government taxes, as driver of technology and more.
While they become tiresome in repeated detail, the notes regarding the effects of salt on food preservation and therefore on human welfare and prosperity are enlightening; much exploration would have been impossible absent that technology.
And the various governments’ attempts to capture the wealth of those engaged in production is also beyond interesting; the French imbroglio particularly amusing in its attempts at justification and ‘fairness’, all undermined by common sense.
There is certainly much of interest here, but also too much beyond interesting. Kurlansky misses not a bit of all of the ‘connections’ of salt, and is not shy about repeating some of them. Or more than some of them.
The book would be improved by an editor willing to remove about a half-hundred pages; as an example, the repetition of various salt preservation techniques gets a bit tiring after the 5th or 6th recipe; McPhee knows when to cut the chatter.
And Kurlansky’s veiled luddism shows up in gratuitous asides now and then: “modern agriculture [..] still fail[s] to end hunger”. He seems to miss that tin-pot dictators are more than a match for good ag technology. And his ‘anti-big-salt’ pages at the end also beg for more honesty, and perhaps the editor’s scissors.
A critical read will find enough failures to question why you’re spending time in the company of more than 400 pages.
But with interest flagging after the Xth exposition of Chinese mine drilling, I found the read worth three stars.

I found this book to be a bit long in the tooth. There was quite a bit of interesting information here, but there could have been more editing to par down some of the "extra" information. There was a lot concerning salt's use in the fish industry. At first this was pretty interesting, but then it became redundant. Is there nothing else that salt has done in history? Apparently not, it's only for salting fish. Another aspect that became redundant was the insertion of recipes throughout the book. The first third of this book really zoomed along, the middle was "meh" and the third act just dragged along. Am I glad I read this book? Yes, it was interesting and unexpected. Would I read it again? No.

Mark Kurlansky's Salt takes its readers on a journey through time and around the world as he explores how the seemingly simple and prosaic salt shaped and molded the history of many of our most influential cultures. From the Roman development of fish sauce that southeast Asian cultures later acquired and made into their own culinary staple to the discovery and use of natural gas, salt has played an important role in the greater human culture we have become.

Kurlansky's Salt is chock full of interesting historical facts, recipes and links to some of history's most important events. As a devout foodie, I loved all of the culinary and historical detail Kurlansky supplied in this book. What was missing was a sense of perspective. I kept hoping for the author to give us his view of the "big picture" as it relates to salt. What did the author think about how salt affected this or that event in world history; I wanted more commentary. Still, Kurlansky's Salt is a very interesting book filled with well-researched details and any foodie, historian or some mix thereof will surely find this book worth reading.

Long ago, I read a one sentence book review, supposedly by a young girl who had just finished a book on penguins. I confess I am shamelessly stealing that sentence, and changing just one word when referring to "Salt": This book told me more about salt than I really wanted to know.

On the other hand, "Salt" deserved a 2.5 rating because the first half of the book was a fairly interesting historical look at the impact of salt, and described how salt is "farmed" and mined -- and it was a good read. But once Mark Kurlanksy started throwing in recipes and digressive segments (what does the McIlhenny family's development of Tabasco sauce in Louisiana have to do with salt?) the book went quickly downhill.

Kurlanksy is a good writer, but the lack of any coherent structure led to the second half of "Salt" being more a collection of anecdotes -- some more interesting than others -- than any kind of narrative.

In short, this book just didn't quite shake out the way Kurlanksy hoped it would, despite his best efforts to spice it up.

Rarely have I read so many the store reader reviews with such different assessments. Furthermore, I am sympathetic to many of them, both positive and negative.

Portions of this book are engaging, even fascinating, while others are dull, rambling, and tangential to the subject. (Chapter 24 might stand alone as commentary on food seasonings in contemporary China, and few readers would guess that its ostensible subject was salt.) Though the book treats salt in various, often exotic, locations around the world, it is less a history—a term that suggests a unifying theme—than a journalistic hop-skip-and-jump through time and space. (Whoever believed that this 450-page book with its numerous recipes would be an appropriate high school reading assignment made an ill-considered choice.)

I came to the subject with little prior knowledge, so I was initially willing to grant the author the benefit of the doubt. I grew more wary when I came upon miscellaneous details that I happened to know something about. (For instance, Kurlansky believes American paddlefish caviar is farmed when, in fact, the paddlefish of the upper Missouri seem unable to survive outside free-flowing river water.) While the book includes a twelve-page bibliography, there are no citations. It may be true that Edmund Burke criticized scientific experiments with gases because they promoted atheism and the French Revolution, but Kurlansky provides no source. In short, I'm glad to have read the book, but as Samuel Johnson famously said of Paradise Lost, “none ever wished it longer.”

Kurlansky’s writing is elegant and inviting, his research is meticulous and the expansive and compelling story he tells about human existence (and salt) is as entertaining as it is educational. While salt is obviously the focal point, his book truly is a world history. Today, few realize the importance salt once played; really ALWAYS played until just recently. That’s what I liked best about the book: the re-introduction to the way of life all our ancestors knew, a way of life requiring the production and preservation of food, two skills the vast majority of so-called “First World” residents lack today. My second favorite aspect of his work was the illumination both of sophisticated technology going back hundreds and even thousands of years and millennium-old technology still used today. Who knew 1st century Chinese salt manufacturers used natural gas burners or that some Mediterranean Bluefin tuna are still “corralled’ today in the same way they were by the Phoenicians? Kurlansky’s cross-disciplinary approach demonstrates that nearly every discipline of science, religion and philosophy, economic system and form of government provides a context for a discussion of salt. I wish he had spent more time on the medicinal and agricultural uses of salt, but those are small potatoes. This is a remarkable book I recommend to everyone, especially those of us who have grown so divorced from the production and preservation of our “daily bread” that we’d be hard-pressed to survive in a world without electricity, grocery stores or restaurants.

Who knew the simple seasoning found in every household has been such a driving force in global history! A simple mineral has shaped human history from the dawn of time. I will never think of salt in the same way ever again.

I read this book because I thought "Why not?". I'm not particularly interested in salt as a mineral, food, or chemical, but I was curious about what a book about salt could look like. And despite a rather uninterested and slow start, I really got into it by the end. This book is more than just a history about salt; it's a history of nearly every culture and country in the general sense, and a book of recipes. I never thought I could know as much about salt as I do now, and frankly, I don't know what to do with most of it. However, because of its detailed references to preserving meats and vegetables, along with the detailed descriptions of how to collect salt, I am adding this book to my bookshelf at home in case of an apocalypse, zombie or otherwise. This book is very nearly a survivalist guide to life without electricity and other luxuries and I think I might get one for all of my family members.

I listened to the audio version of this book. I honestly don't know if I could have finished it if I had read the physical version as it's so detailed that it borders on boring in many places. The narrator of the book did a decent job with the subject matter, but by the time I finished I was listening to it at 1.7x just to get through it.

Definitely a keeper.

My interest in non-Indo-European languages drew me to The Basque History of the World by Mark Kurlansky. I highly recommend this book, although I read it years before I started writing book reviews. When my library selected Kurlansky's following book from 2002, Salt: A World History recently as a Rave & Fave, I recognized the author's name and decided to read it. Kurlansky wrote a lengthy account of salt and how it has affected world history. One might never have thought that a history of salt could fill 484 pages, yet Kurlansky shared how early civilizations used salt as a way of survival by preserving food with it. Ancient Egyptians didn't stop with food, for pharaohs were preserved in mummification by the generous application of salt.

In the Middle Ages, Venice was one of Europe's leading capitals for the importation and distribution of salt. It regulated prices by keeping control of salt, and even destroyed other Mediterranean saltworks in order to stay on top. In mediaeval times, cities found power not just by how much gold they mined, but also by how much salt they controlled.

As much as I was interested in the topic of salt as a "preservative of world history", I was often bored by the storytelling. This surprised me, as I didn't have the same impression with The Basque History of the World, although I shouldn't make a comparison with merely one other book in an author's oeuvre. There was so much covered over 26 chapters that when Kurlansky made a referral to a name or location covered earlier in the text, I sometimes forgot the relevance of the antecedent, which led me to the generous index to find the earlier passages. However to his credit I cannot neglect to say that in each book, Kurlansky supplemented the histories with local recipes. Many from Salt were centuries old. I found the methods that food was prepared and preserved to be fascinating, and not much different from how our pioneers preserved food before the advent of refrigeration.

The archeological records shows that several European cultures reached North America centuries before Columbus. In order to travel across the Atlantic, these explorers had to have ample food stocks to withstand the journey. I was surprised that Kurlansky did not mention, as he did in his own Basque History of the World, that early trans-Atlantic explorers, such as the Norse and Basques, were able to stay out at sea and stave off scurvy by supplementing their diets with salt cod. Thus salt, when used as a food preservative, enabled explorers to travel farther than they had in the past. The discovery and settlement of North and South America would likely not have happened when it did, had the ships not been able to stock such a vitamin-rich non-perishable food source. Salted fish also saved many European populations:

"Fishermen, instead of rushing to market with their small catch before it rotted, could stay out for days salting their catch. Expeditions to Newfoundland were out from spring until fall. Salt made it possible to get the rich bounty of northern seas to the poor people of Europe. Salt cod by the bail, along with salted herring by the barrel, are justly credited with having prevented famine in many parts of Europe."

Interspersed with these histories and recipes were stories about the ways different cultures acquired salt. Salt was certainly mined, but it was more often produced by evaporating brine. Kurlansky covered how effective each method was and what kind of salt crystals these methods yielded. Salt was produced for different purposes and what I found most interesting was that most salt produced in North America is not for food consumption or for preservation, but rather for snow and ice melting. In fact we owe our system of regional roads in Canada and the USA to the location of salt:

"Studying a road map of almost anywhere in North America, noting the whimsical nongeometric pattern of the secondary roads, the local roads, the map reader could reasonably assume that the towns were placed and interconnected haphazardly without any scheme or design. That is because the roads are simply widened footpaths and trails, and these trails were originally cut by animals looking for salt."

Salt: A World History gave me answers to more questions about salt than I could ever ask, and thankfully satisfied my curiosity about the origins of all the different coarse and colourful salts I like to pick up from Trader Joe's.

My interest in non-Indo-European languages drew me to The Basque History of the World by Mark Kurlansky. I highly recommend this book, although I read it years before I started writing book reviews. When my library selected Kurlansky's following book from 2002, Salt: A World History recently as a Rave & Fave, I recognized the author's name and decided to read it. Kurlansky wrote a lengthy account of salt and how it has affected world history. One might never have thought that a history of salt could fill 484 pages, yet Kurlansky shared how early civilizations used salt as a way of survival by preserving food with it. Ancient Egyptians didn't stop with food, for pharaohs were preserved in mummification by the generous application of salt.

In the Middle Ages, Venice was one of Europe's leading capitals for the importation and distribution of salt. It regulated prices by keeping control of salt, and even destroyed other Mediterranean saltworks in order to stay on top. In mediaeval times, cities found power not just by how much gold they mined, but also by how much salt they controlled.

As much as I was interested in the topic of salt as a "preservative of world history", I was often bored by the storytelling. This surprised me, as I didn't have the same impression with The Basque History of the World, although I shouldn't make a comparison with merely one other book in an author's oeuvre. There was so much covered over 26 chapters that when Kurlansky made a referral to a name or location covered earlier in the text, I sometimes forgot the relevance of the antecedent, which led me to the generous index to find the earlier passages. However to his credit I cannot neglect to say that in each book, Kurlansky supplemented the histories with local recipes. Many from Salt were centuries old. I found the methods that food was prepared and preserved to be fascinating, and not much different from how our pioneers preserved food before the advent of refrigeration.

The archeological records shows that several European cultures reached North America centuries before Columbus. In order to travel across the Atlantic, these explorers had to have ample food stocks to withstand the journey. I was surprised that Kurlansky did not mention, as he did in his own Basque History of the World, that early trans-Atlantic explorers, such as the Norse and Basques, were able to stay out at sea and stave off scurvy by supplementing their diets with salt cod. Thus salt, when used as a food preservative, enabled explorers to travel farther than they had in the past. The discovery and settlement of North and South America would likely not have happened when it did, had the ships not been able to stock such a vitamin-rich non-perishable food source. Salted fish also saved many European populations:

"Fishermen, instead of rushing to market with their small catch before it rotted, could stay out for days salting their catch. Expeditions to Newfoundland were out from spring until fall. Salt made it possible to get the rich bounty of northern seas to the poor people of Europe. Salt cod by the bail, along with salted herring by the barrel, are justly credited with having prevented famine in many parts of Europe."

Interspersed with these histories and recipes were stories about the ways different cultures acquired salt. Salt was certainly mined, but it was more often produced by evaporating brine. Kurlansky covered how effective each method was and what kind of salt crystals these methods yielded. Salt was produced for different purposes and what I found most interesting was that most salt produced in North America is not for food consumption or for preservation, but rather for snow and ice melting. In fact we owe our system of regional roads in Canada and the USA to the location of salt:

"Studying a road map of almost anywhere in North America, noting the whimsical nongeometric pattern of the secondary roads, the local roads, the map reader could reasonably assume that the towns were placed and interconnected haphazardly without any scheme or design. That is because the roads are simply widened footpaths and trails, and these trails were originally cut by animals looking for salt."

Salt: A World History gave me answers to more questions about salt than I could ever ask, and thankfully satisfied my curiosity about the origins of all the different coarse and colourful salts I like to pick up from Trader Joe's.

My interest in non-Indo-European languages drew me to The Basque History of the World by Mark Kurlansky. I highly recommend this book, although I read it years before I started writing book reviews. When my library selected Kurlansky's following book from 2002, Salt: A World History recently as a Rave & Fave, I recognized the author's name and decided to read it. Kurlansky wrote a lengthy account of salt and how it has affected world history. One might never have thought that a history of salt could fill 484 pages, yet Kurlansky shared how early civilizations used salt as a way of survival by preserving food with it. Ancient Egyptians didn't stop with food, for pharaohs were preserved in mummification by the generous application of salt.

In the Middle Ages, Venice was one of Europe's leading capitals for the importation and distribution of salt. It regulated prices by keeping control of salt, and even destroyed other Mediterranean saltworks in order to stay on top. In mediaeval times, cities found power not just by how much gold they mined, but also by how much salt they controlled.

As much as I was interested in the topic of salt as a "preservative of world history", I was often bored by the storytelling. This surprised me, as I didn't have the same impression with The Basque History of the World, although I shouldn't make a comparison with merely one other book in an author's oeuvre. There was so much covered over 26 chapters that when Kurlansky made a referral to a name or location covered earlier in the text, I sometimes forgot the relevance of the antecedent, which led me to the generous index to find the earlier passages. However to his credit I cannot neglect to say that in each book, Kurlansky supplemented the histories with local recipes. Many from Salt were centuries old. I found the methods that food was prepared and preserved to be fascinating, and not much different from how our pioneers preserved food before the advent of refrigeration.

The archeological records shows that several European cultures reached North America centuries before Columbus. In order to travel across the Atlantic, these explorers had to have ample food stocks to withstand the journey. I was surprised that Kurlansky did not mention, as he did in his own Basque History of the World, that early trans-Atlantic explorers, such as the Norse and Basques, were able to stay out at sea and stave off scurvy by supplementing their diets with salt cod. Thus salt, when used as a food preservative, enabled explorers to travel farther than they had in the past. The discovery and settlement of North and South America would likely not have happened when it did, had the ships not been able to stock such a vitamin-rich non-perishable food source. Salted fish also saved many European populations:

"Fishermen, instead of rushing to market with their small catch before it rotted, could stay out for days salting their catch. Expeditions to Newfoundland were out from spring until fall. Salt made it possible to get the rich bounty of northern seas to the poor people of Europe. Salt cod by the bail, along with salted herring by the barrel, are justly credited with having prevented famine in many parts of Europe."

Interspersed with these histories and recipes were stories about the ways different cultures acquired salt. Salt was certainly mined, but it was more often produced by evaporating brine. Kurlansky covered how effective each method was and what kind of salt crystals these methods yielded. Salt was produced for different purposes and what I found most interesting was that most salt produced in North America is not for food consumption or for preservation, but rather for snow and ice melting. In fact we owe our system of regional roads in Canada and the USA to the location of salt:

"Studying a road map of almost anywhere in North America, noting the whimsical nongeometric pattern of the secondary roads, the local roads, the map reader could reasonably assume that the towns were placed and interconnected haphazardly without any scheme or design. That is because the roads are simply widened footpaths and trails, and these trails were originally cut by animals looking for salt."

Salt: A World History gave me answers to more questions about salt than I could ever ask, and thankfully satisfied my curiosity about the origins of all the different coarse and colourful salts I like to pick up from Trader Joe's.

My interest in non-Indo-European languages drew me to The Basque History of the World by Mark Kurlansky. I highly recommend this book, although I read it years before I started writing book reviews. When my library selected Kurlansky's following book from 2002, Salt: A World History recently as a Rave & Fave, I recognized the author's name and decided to read it. Kurlansky wrote a lengthy account of salt and how it has affected world history. One might never have thought that a history of salt could fill 484 pages, yet Kurlansky shared how early civilizations used salt as a way of survival by preserving food with it. Ancient Egyptians didn't stop with food, for pharaohs were preserved in mummification by the generous application of salt.

In the Middle Ages, Venice was one of Europe's leading capitals for the importation and distribution of salt. It regulated prices by keeping control of salt, and even destroyed other Mediterranean saltworks in order to stay on top. In mediaeval times, cities found power not just by how much gold they mined, but also by how much salt they controlled.

As much as I was interested in the topic of salt as a "preservative of world history", I was often bored by the storytelling. This surprised me, as I didn't have the same impression with The Basque History of the World, although I shouldn't make a comparison with merely one other book in an author's oeuvre. There was so much covered over 26 chapters that when Kurlansky made a referral to a name or location covered earlier in the text, I sometimes forgot the relevance of the antecedent, which led me to the generous index to find the earlier passages. However to his credit I cannot neglect to say that in each book, Kurlansky supplemented the histories with local recipes. Many from Salt were centuries old. I found the methods that food was prepared and preserved to be fascinating, and not much different from how our pioneers preserved food before the advent of refrigeration.

The archeological records shows that several European cultures reached North America centuries before Columbus. In order to travel across the Atlantic, these explorers had to have ample food stocks to withstand the journey. I was surprised that Kurlansky did not mention, as he did in his own Basque History of the World, that early trans-Atlantic explorers, such as the Norse and Basques, were able to stay out at sea and stave off scurvy by supplementing their diets with salt cod. Thus salt, when used as a food preservative, enabled explorers to travel farther than they had in the past. The discovery and settlement of North and South America would likely not have happened when it did, had the ships not been able to stock such a vitamin-rich non-perishable food source. Salted fish also saved many European populations:

"Fishermen, instead of rushing to market with their small catch before it rotted, could stay out for days salting their catch. Expeditions to Newfoundland were out from spring until fall. Salt made it possible to get the rich bounty of northern seas to the poor people of Europe. Salt cod by the bail, along with salted herring by the barrel, are justly credited with having prevented famine in many parts of Europe."

Interspersed with these histories and recipes were stories about the ways different cultures acquired salt. Salt was certainly mined, but it was more often produced by evaporating brine. Kurlansky covered how effective each method was and what kind of salt crystals these methods yielded. Salt was produced for different purposes and what I found most interesting was that most salt produced in North America is not for food consumption or for preservation, but rather for snow and ice melting. In fact we owe our system of regional roads in Canada and the USA to the location of salt:

"Studying a road map of almost anywhere in North America, noting the whimsical nongeometric pattern of the secondary roads, the local roads, the map reader could reasonably assume that the towns were placed and interconnected haphazardly without any scheme or design. That is because the roads are simply widened footpaths and trails, and these trails were originally cut by animals looking for salt."

Salt: A World History gave me answers to more questions about salt than I could ever ask, and thankfully satisfied my curiosity about the origins of all the different coarse and colourful salts I like to pick up from Trader Joe's.

My interest in non-Indo-European languages drew me to The Basque History of the World by Mark Kurlansky. I highly recommend this book, although I read it years before I started writing book reviews. When my library selected Kurlansky's following book from 2002, Salt: A World History recently as a Rave & Fave, I recognized the author's name and decided to read it. Kurlansky wrote a lengthy account of salt and how it has affected world history. One might never have thought that a history of salt could fill 484 pages, yet Kurlansky shared how early civilizations used salt as a way of survival by preserving food with it. Ancient Egyptians didn't stop with food, for pharaohs were preserved in mummification by the generous application of salt.

In the Middle Ages, Venice was one of Europe's leading capitals for the importation and distribution of salt. It regulated prices by keeping control of salt, and even destroyed other Mediterranean saltworks in order to stay on top. In mediaeval times, cities found power not just by how much gold they mined, but also by how much salt they controlled.

As much as I was interested in the topic of salt as a "preservative of world history", I was often bored by the storytelling. This surprised me, as I didn't have the same impression with The Basque History of the World, although I shouldn't make a comparison with merely one other book in an author's oeuvre. There was so much covered over 26 chapters that when Kurlansky made a referral to a name or location covered earlier in the text, I sometimes forgot the relevance of the antecedent, which led me to the generous index to find the earlier passages. However to his credit I cannot neglect to say that in each book, Kurlansky supplemented the histories with local recipes. Many from Salt were centuries old. I found the methods that food was prepared and preserved to be fascinating, and not much different from how our pioneers preserved food before the advent of refrigeration.

The archeological records shows that several European cultures reached North America centuries before Columbus. In order to travel across the Atlantic, these explorers had to have ample food stocks to withstand the journey. I was surprised that Kurlansky did not mention, as he did in his own Basque History of the World, that early trans-Atlantic explorers, such as the Norse and Basques, were able to stay out at sea and stave off scurvy by supplementing their diets with salt cod. Thus salt, when used as a food preservative, enabled explorers to travel farther than they had in the past. The discovery and settlement of North and South America would likely not have happened when it did, had the ships not been able to stock such a vitamin-rich non-perishable food source. Salted fish also saved many European populations:

"Fishermen, instead of rushing to market with their small catch before it rotted, could stay out for days salting their catch. Expeditions to Newfoundland were out from spring until fall. Salt made it possible to get the rich bounty of northern seas to the poor people of Europe. Salt cod by the bail, along with salted herring by the barrel, are justly credited with having prevented famine in many parts of Europe."

Interspersed with these histories and recipes were stories about the ways different cultures acquired salt. Salt was certainly mined, but it was more often produced by evaporating brine. Kurlansky covered how effective each method was and what kind of salt crystals these methods yielded. Salt was produced for different purposes and what I found most interesting was that most salt produced in North America is not for food consumption or for preservation, but rather for snow and ice melting. In fact we owe our system of regional roads in Canada and the USA to the location of salt:

"Studying a road map of almost anywhere in North America, noting the whimsical nongeometric pattern of the secondary roads, the local roads, the map reader could reasonably assume that the towns were placed and interconnected haphazardly without any scheme or design. That is because the roads are simply widened footpaths and trails, and these trails were originally cut by animals looking for salt."

Salt: A World History gave me answers to more questions about salt than I could ever ask, and thankfully satisfied my curiosity about the origins of all the different coarse and colourful salts I like to pick up from Trader Joe's.

My interest in non-Indo-European languages drew me to The Basque History of the World by Mark Kurlansky. I highly recommend this book, although I read it years before I started writing book reviews. When my library selected Kurlansky's following book from 2002, Salt: A World History recently as a Rave & Fave, I recognized the author's name and decided to read it. Kurlansky wrote a lengthy account of salt and how it has affected world history. One might never have thought that a history of salt could fill 484 pages, yet Kurlansky shared how early civilizations used salt as a way of survival by preserving food with it. Ancient Egyptians didn't stop with food, for pharaohs were preserved in mummification by the generous application of salt.

In the Middle Ages, Venice was one of Europe's leading capitals for the importation and distribution of salt. It regulated prices by keeping control of salt, and even destroyed other Mediterranean saltworks in order to stay on top. In mediaeval times, cities found power not just by how much gold they mined, but also by how much salt they controlled.

As much as I was interested in the topic of salt as a "preservative of world history", I was often bored by the storytelling. This surprised me, as I didn't have the same impression with The Basque History of the World, although I shouldn't make a comparison with merely one other book in an author's oeuvre. There was so much covered over 26 chapters that when Kurlansky made a referral to a name or location covered earlier in the text, I sometimes forgot the relevance of the antecedent, which led me to the generous index to find the earlier passages. However to his credit I cannot neglect to say that in each book, Kurlansky supplemented the histories with local recipes. Many from Salt were centuries old. I found the methods that food was prepared and preserved to be fascinating, and not much different from how our pioneers preserved food before the advent of refrigeration.

The archeological records shows that several European cultures reached North America centuries before Columbus. In order to travel across the Atlantic, these explorers had to have ample food stocks to withstand the journey. I was surprised that Kurlansky did not mention, as he did in his own Basque History of the World, that early trans-Atlantic explorers, such as the Norse and Basques, were able to stay out at sea and stave off scurvy by supplementing their diets with salt cod. Thus salt, when used as a food preservative, enabled explorers to travel farther than they had in the past. The discovery and settlement of North and South America would likely not have happened when it did, had the ships not been able to stock such a vitamin-rich non-perishable food source. Salted fish also saved many European populations:

"Fishermen, instead of rushing to market with their small catch before it rotted, could stay out for days salting their catch. Expeditions to Newfoundland were out from spring until fall. Salt made it possible to get the rich bounty of northern seas to the poor people of Europe. Salt cod by the bail, along with salted herring by the barrel, are justly credited with having prevented famine in many parts of Europe."

Interspersed with these histories and recipes were stories about the ways different cultures acquired salt. Salt was certainly mined, but it was more often produced by evaporating brine. Kurlansky covered how effective each method was and what kind of salt crystals these methods yielded. Salt was produced for different purposes and what I found most interesting was that most salt produced in North America is not for food consumption or for preservation, but rather for snow and ice melting. In fact we owe our system of regional roads in Canada and the USA to the location of salt:

"Studying a road map of almost anywhere in North America, noting the whimsical nongeometric pattern of the secondary roads, the local roads, the map reader could reasonably assume that the towns were placed and interconnected haphazardly without any scheme or design. That is because the roads are simply widened footpaths and trails, and these trails were originally cut by animals looking for salt."

Salt: A World History gave me answers to more questions about salt than I could ever ask, and thankfully satisfied my curiosity about the origins of all the different coarse and colourful salts I like to pick up from Trader Joe's.

My interest in non-Indo-European languages drew me to The Basque History of the World by Mark Kurlansky. I highly recommend this book, although I read it years before I started writing book reviews. When my library selected Kurlansky's following book from 2002, Salt: A World History recently as a Rave & Fave, I recognized the author's name and decided to read it. Kurlansky wrote a lengthy account of salt and how it has affected world history. One might never have thought that a history of salt could fill 484 pages, yet Kurlansky shared how early civilizations used salt as a way of survival by preserving food with it. Ancient Egyptians didn't stop with food, for pharaohs were preserved in mummification by the generous application of salt.

In the Middle Ages, Venice was one of Europe's leading capitals for the importation and distribution of salt. It regulated prices by keeping control of salt, and even destroyed other Mediterranean saltworks in order to stay on top. In mediaeval times, cities found power not just by how much gold they mined, but also by how much salt they controlled.

As much as I was interested in the topic of salt as a "preservative of world history", I was often bored by the storytelling. This surprised me, as I didn't have the same impression with The Basque History of the World, although I shouldn't make a comparison with merely one other book in an author's oeuvre. There was so much covered over 26 chapters that when Kurlansky made a referral to a name or location covered earlier in the text, I sometimes forgot the relevance of the antecedent, which led me to the generous index to find the earlier passages. However to his credit I cannot neglect to say that in each book, Kurlansky supplemented the histories with local recipes. Many from Salt were centuries old. I found the methods that food was prepared and preserved to be fascinating, and not much different from how our pioneers preserved food before the advent of refrigeration.

The archeological records shows that several European cultures reached North America centuries before Columbus. In order to travel across the Atlantic, these explorers had to have ample food stocks to withstand the journey. I was surprised that Kurlansky did not mention, as he did in his own Basque History of the World, that early trans-Atlantic explorers, such as the Norse and Basques, were able to stay out at sea and stave off scurvy by supplementing their diets with salt cod. Thus salt, when used as a food preservative, enabled explorers to travel farther than they had in the past. The discovery and settlement of North and South America would likely not have happened when it did, had the ships not been able to stock such a vitamin-rich non-perishable food source. Salted fish also saved many European populations:

"Fishermen, instead of rushing to market with their small catch before it rotted, could stay out for days salting their catch. Expeditions to Newfoundland were out from spring until fall. Salt made it possible to get the rich bounty of northern seas to the poor people of Europe. Salt cod by the bail, along with salted herring by the barrel, are justly credited with having prevented famine in many parts of Europe."

Interspersed with these histories and recipes were stories about the ways different cultures acquired salt. Salt was certainly mined, but it was more often produced by evaporating brine. Kurlansky covered how effective each method was and what kind of salt crystals these methods yielded. Salt was produced for different purposes and what I found most interesting was that most salt produced in North America is not for food consumption or for preservation, but rather for snow and ice melting. In fact we owe our system of regional roads in Canada and the USA to the location of salt:

"Studying a road map of almost anywhere in North America, noting the whimsical nongeometric pattern of the secondary roads, the local roads, the map reader could reasonably assume that the towns were placed and interconnected haphazardly without any scheme or design. That is because the roads are simply widened footpaths and trails, and these trails were originally cut by animals looking for salt."

Salt: A World History gave me answers to more questions about salt than I could ever ask, and thankfully satisfied my curiosity about the origins of all the different coarse and colourful salts I like to pick up from Trader Joe's.

Countless processed food packages triumph “Less Salt” “50% Lower in Salt,” etc. indicating that salt now is often seen as an unsavory character. For the longest time, however, it has been lauded as a God-send; it has long been highly valued to preserve food (before the advent of refrigeration and canning) and without a generous supply of it hunter-gathers would not have been able to even consider embarking on agricultural endeavors. Tappable supplies of salt make agricultural societies and the husbanding of livestock supportable; successful production of which in turn encourages trade and trade encourages development.

The author herein speaks much about the importance of fish, specifically herring and cod. Only when massive quantities of fish can be preserved is it worthwhile to consider the massive harvesting of such…and that, in turn necessitates further trade development. And trade encourages trade. It is like dominos, in some respects; not the conventional game, but the tipping of one to engineer the fall of as many further ones that can be lined up afore it. Salt, per se, wasn’t the first domino, but rather the plentiful supply of it could have been the first domino. After which the whole world in effect started to speed up! The book gives many examples of such. I will give several that I find interesting:

Transportation: First great Roman road was the Via Salaria, the Salt road.

Cities: “Most Italian cities were founded proximate to saltworks, starting with Rome…” and made Venice a huge trading, then banking, power.

Politics: Salt revenues allowed the Qin dynasty in China to build the Great Wall; precipitated the French Revolution; and even helped Gandhi bring about Indian Independence.

This book is not a comprehensive history of salt, but it illustrates the fact that "The story of salt," actually, is the story of significant pieces of our world and this readable book makes that apparent.

My interest in non-Indo-European languages drew me to The Basque History of the World by Mark Kurlansky. I highly recommend this book, although I read it years before I started writing book reviews. When my library selected Kurlansky's following book from 2002, Salt: A World History recently as a Rave & Fave, I recognized the author's name and decided to read it. Kurlansky wrote a lengthy account of salt and how it has affected world history. One might never have thought that a history of salt could fill 484 pages, yet Kurlansky shared how early civilizations used salt as a way of survival by preserving food with it. Ancient Egyptians didn't stop with food, for pharaohs were preserved in mummification by the generous application of salt.

In the Middle Ages, Venice was one of Europe's leading capitals for the importation and distribution of salt. It regulated prices by keeping control of salt, and even destroyed other Mediterranean saltworks in order to stay on top. In mediaeval times, cities found power not just by how much gold they mined, but also by how much salt they controlled.

As much as I was interested in the topic of salt as a "preservative of world history", I was often bored by the storytelling. This surprised me, as I didn't have the same impression with The Basque History of the World, although I shouldn't make a comparison with merely one other book in an author's oeuvre. There was so much covered over 26 chapters that when Kurlansky made a referral to a name or location covered earlier in the text, I sometimes forgot the relevance of the antecedent, which led me to the generous index to find the earlier passages. However to his credit I cannot neglect to say that in each book, Kurlansky supplemented the histories with local recipes. Many from Salt were centuries old. I found the methods that food was prepared and preserved to be fascinating, and not much different from how our pioneers preserved food before the advent of refrigeration.

The archeological records shows that several European cultures reached North America centuries before Columbus. In order to travel across the Atlantic, these explorers had to have ample food stocks to withstand the journey. I was surprised that Kurlansky did not mention, as he did in his own Basque History of the World, that early trans-Atlantic explorers, such as the Norse and Basques, were able to stay out at sea and stave off scurvy by supplementing their diets with salt cod. Thus salt, when used as a food preservative, enabled explorers to travel farther than they had in the past. The discovery and settlement of North and South America would likely not have happened when it did, had the ships not been able to stock such a vitamin-rich non-perishable food source. Salted fish also saved many European populations:

"Fishermen, instead of rushing to market with their small catch before it rotted, could stay out for days salting their catch. Expeditions to Newfoundland were out from spring until fall. Salt made it possible to get the rich bounty of northern seas to the poor people of Europe. Salt cod by the bail, along with salted herring by the barrel, are justly credited with having prevented famine in many parts of Europe."

Interspersed with these histories and recipes were stories about the ways different cultures acquired salt. Salt was certainly mined, but it was more often produced by evaporating brine. Kurlansky covered how effective each method was and what kind of salt crystals these methods yielded. Salt was produced for different purposes and what I found most interesting was that most salt produced in North America is not for food consumption or for preservation, but rather for snow and ice melting. In fact we owe our system of regional roads in Canada and the USA to the location of salt:

"Studying a road map of almost anywhere in North America, noting the whimsical nongeometric pattern of the secondary roads, the local roads, the map reader could reasonably assume that the towns were placed and interconnected haphazardly without any scheme or design. That is because the roads are simply widened footpaths and trails, and these trails were originally cut by animals looking for salt."

Salt: A World History gave me answers to more questions about salt than I could ever ask, and thankfully satisfied my curiosity about the origins of all the different coarse and colourful salts I like to pick up from Trader Joe's.

It would seem that a book claiming to tell the history of salt as a mirror for the history of humanity would have some stories to tell.

Maybe I've been spoiled by the ability of writers such as Malcolm Gladwell, Stephen Dubner, or Chip Heath to captivate as well as educate so that I expect much more from my reading material but it was just too boring to finish. I gave up around page 75. It was a lot of "and then this happened and then this happened and then this and that and that and this. Oh, and now we'll look at another area of the world. This happened and then another thing or two occurred." Too linear, too chronological, and without any unifying theme or idea let alone any story. But lots of words about ancient history and how people needed to transport a heavy salt load. I've read textbooks and they serve their purpose I suppose but the secret is out that nonfiction can tell a story and hold an audience as effectively as any novel in the hands of the accomplished storyteller.

This is a fascinating social history that shows just what a really good writer can do with any topic. There are events here, and people, and even images (including one of underground palaces made of salt) that fire our imagination.

The book begins with the author in rural Sichuan Province, on the bank of a rice paddy, pondering the Chistory of salt in China. China is the oldest literate society still in existence, and its 4,000 years of written history begin as a history of inventions. Chinese salt history begins with the mythical HUANGDI, who invented writing, weaponry and transportation. According to the legends, he also presided over the first war fought over salt.

What follows is a lively mixture of scholarship, anecdotes, accounts of salt wars and fortunes being made (and lost) and the biographies of the people and places involved. There are enough storylines here to fill a dozen novels, and the history of the world comes alive with personalities as well. If you’re looking for a book to get lost in, try this one instead of a fat novel. You’ll find it a most engaging read.

No one can fault the author for his research, which is nothing if not exhaustive, but taking the product of that research and stringing it back to back in a never-ending sequence of isolated facts does not make for an interesting read. The best historians address broad themes, weaving facts together in a way that not only demonstrates their relationship to each other, but to the overall point the author is trying to support. There pretty much is no theme to "Salt: A World History." It is nothing more than a compendium of facts related to salt, presented in almost random order. A few of the facts are interesting in and of themselves, but the overwhelming majority are simply data points that have no particular relevance because of the author's failure to put them into any kind of broader perspective. It is amazing to me that this book was received as well as it was. I found it terribly boring and frustrating.

Salt. It's the one rock we eat. Too much salt can kill you; not enough can kill you, too. Until recent times, when modern geology literally unearthed the world's abundance of salt, salt was the Holy Grail. More than gold, it was salt that everyone was after.

Nearly every Roman city was built near salt works. Rome itself was built in the hills behind a saltworks at the mouth of the Tiber River. Two of the great city-states of the Middle Ages--Venice and Genoa--grew rich by monopolizing the salt trade.

Salt was a form of money. The origin of the word "salary" is salt, as in "worth his salt" and "earning his salt." The Latin word "sal" became the French word "solde," meaning pay, which is the origin of the word "soldier." The Romans salted their greens, which is the origin of the word "salad."

Salt was put into everything, into cream to make butter, into milk curd to make cheese, and into meat and especially fish as a preservative. Salt brine made olives palatable and ham delectable. The ancient Egyptians used salt to mummify bodies. In the middle ages, salt was used to cure leather, clean chimneys, solder pipes, and as medicine to cure a number of ailments.

Thousands of years of coveting, fighting over, hoarding, taxing, and forever searching for salt seems somehow foolish today. But is it any more foolish than coveting, fighting over, hoarding, taxing, and forever searching for oil?

Author Mark Kurlansky weaves a fascinating story that has something to enlighten and delight readers on nearly every page. Yes, there are a lot of recipes. If they're a bother, skip `em. Just don't let it stop you from buying this book. Five stars.

I love everything that Kurlansky does. I accidentally happened on to him when my wife drug home "The Big Oyster" from the library, and I've periodically gone out and found his other books. With Kurlansky you get a historical narrative based around some object which Kurlansky will start out with in the beginning and then bring full circle to a point where it seems like you come right back to the beginning. Its like a historical roller coaster ride, you leave from the loading platform and go right around back to .... the loading platform. Along the way there are big hills, steep descents and sharp turns (metaphorically speaking). How can he make a narrative on the history of salt that much fun? Because as most of us have learned over the years, its not the big block letter title events that tell the story, but all those little stories underneath that make up the patchwork quilt of life.

By example Kurlansky covers salt making and mining in ancient China with its development of drilling, sink hole creation in Chester, England, the trading of fish (especially salt cod), the creation of Tabasco sauce (yep, it has to do with salt), the dead sea, and Mortons. It's hard to explain, and those of you who don't like drinking facts and factual stories from a firehose need not give it a try. But those of you fact geeks who are going salt?...hmmmm.....salt....mmmm...okaaaay give it a try. I don't think you'll be disappointed.

AP World History Review: Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky was a very intriguing book about the history of how salt was produced, used, and transformed many societies. Mark Kurlansky's purpose of this book was to express how valuable a good salt was and how it often represented power. Once discovering the Americas, Europe made more revenue off of salt than gold. Salt played a role in the emergence of chemistry, created more revenue than gold at sometimes,and often helped the expansion of empires like the Roman Empire. Many societies, such as France and China, placed a tax on salt.

I would recommend this book because most of us eat salt and use salt in many of our foods. This book by Mark Kurlansky gives insight as to where salt came from and all the places it has traveled. It also is informative of how salt was used differently and similarly depending on where it traveled. China used salts for condiments, Egyptians used it for fish and meat, Celts mined salt, Rome used salt for fish, the Basque used salt for salted cod, Europe made bay salt. Salt has a long history with a diverse amount of places and Mark Kurlansky really explains that well.

I am a rising sophomore in high school and this book was my summer reading assignment for world history. To sum up the book briefly: I never once sat down to it without falling asleep. The historical content was bland and much of it was not even about the mineral itself. Kurlansky wandered off topic throughout the entire book and continued to go on random tangents about wars and foods unrelated to salt's pivotal role in the history of the world throughout the exposition. I would never recommend this book to anyone, unless of course I enjoyed watching them suffer for 450 pages on end.

Mark Kurlansky has written several very interesting & informative books (Salt, Cod, The Big Oyster).

My frustration is that he needs to brush up his grammar as well as his sentence, paragraph, and chapter constructions; he lacks the very basics that I myself learned in high school English class in the 1960's! Specifically: he uses double prepositions ('off of' is everywhere), ends sentences with prepositions, promulgates run-on sentences as well as obscure subject/object interfaces, etc. The time-lines jump around horribly and he refers to geographical areas without displaying maps to support them; e.g., a whole chapter about salt in France without a single map with the specific towns/areas shown! I must wonder who edited the books ... surely a good editor would have caught and fixed these glaring errors.

You can compare his work with the writing styles of REALLY good non-fiction writers Simon Winchester, Charles M Mann, Robert K Massie, and David McCullough, who manage to be equally informative and their presentations are so much more polished!

No one can fault the author for his research, which is nothing if not exhaustive, but taking the product of that research and stringing it back to back in a never-ending sequence of isolated facts does not make for an interesting read. The best historians address broad themes, weaving facts together in a way that not only demonstrates their relationship to each other, but to the overall point the author is trying to support. There pretty much is no theme to "Salt: A World History." It is nothing more than a compendium of facts related to salt, presented in almost random order. A few of the facts are interesting in and of themselves, but the overwhelming majority are simply data points that have no particular relevance because of the author's failure to put them into any kind of broader perspective. It is amazing to me that this book was received as well as it was. I found it terribly boring and frustrating.

Salt. It's the one rock we eat. Too much salt can kill you; not enough can kill you, too. Until recent times, when modern geology literally unearthed the world's abundance of salt, salt was the Holy Grail. More than gold, it was salt that everyone was after.

Nearly every Roman city was built near salt works. Rome itself was built in the hills behind a saltworks at the mouth of the Tiber River. Two of the great city-states of the Middle Ages--Venice and Genoa--grew rich by monopolizing the salt trade.

Salt was a form of money. The origin of the word "salary" is salt, as in "worth his salt" and "earning his salt." The Latin word "sal" became the French word "solde," meaning pay, which is the origin of the word "soldier." The Romans salted their greens, which is the origin of the word "salad."

Salt was put into everything, into cream to make butter, into milk curd to make cheese, and into meat and especially fish as a preservative. Salt brine made olives palatable and ham delectable. The ancient Egyptians used salt to mummify bodies. In the middle ages, salt was used to cure leather, clean chimneys, solder pipes, and as medicine to cure a number of ailments.

Thousands of years of coveting, fighting over, hoarding, taxing, and forever searching for salt seems somehow foolish today. But is it any more foolish than coveting, fighting over, hoarding, taxing, and forever searching for oil?

Author Mark Kurlansky weaves a fascinating story that has something to enlighten and delight readers on nearly every page. Yes, there are a lot of recipes. If they're a bother, skip `em. Just don't let it stop you from buying this book. Five stars.

I love everything that Kurlansky does. I accidentally happened on to him when my wife drug home "The Big Oyster" from the library, and I've periodically gone out and found his other books. With Kurlansky you get a historical narrative based around some object which Kurlansky will start out with in the beginning and then bring full circle to a point where it seems like you come right back to the beginning. Its like a historical roller coaster ride, you leave from the loading platform and go right around back to .... the loading platform. Along the way there are big hills, steep descents and sharp turns (metaphorically speaking). How can he make a narrative on the history of salt that much fun? Because as most of us have learned over the years, its not the big block letter title events that tell the story, but all those little stories underneath that make up the patchwork quilt of life.

By example Kurlansky covers salt making and mining in ancient China with its development of drilling, sink hole creation in Chester, England, the trading of fish (especially salt cod), the creation of Tabasco sauce (yep, it has to do with salt), the dead sea, and Mortons. It's hard to explain, and those of you who don't like drinking facts and factual stories from a firehose need not give it a try. But those of you fact geeks who are going salt?...hmmmm.....salt....mmmm...okaaaay give it a try. I don't think you'll be disappointed.

AP World History Review: Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky was a very intriguing book about the history of how salt was produced, used, and transformed many societies. Mark Kurlansky's purpose of this book was to express how valuable a good salt was and how it often represented power. Once discovering the Americas, Europe made more revenue off of salt than gold. Salt played a role in the emergence of chemistry, created more revenue than gold at sometimes,and often helped the expansion of empires like the Roman Empire. Many societies, such as France and China, placed a tax on salt.

I would recommend this book because most of us eat salt and use salt in many of our foods. This book by Mark Kurlansky gives insight as to where salt came from and all the places it has traveled. It also is informative of how salt was used differently and similarly depending on where it traveled. China used salts for condiments, Egyptians used it for fish and meat, Celts mined salt, Rome used salt for fish, the Basque used salt for salted cod, Europe made bay salt. Salt has a long history with a diverse amount of places and Mark Kurlansky really explains that well.

I am a rising sophomore in high school and this book was my summer reading assignment for world history. To sum up the book briefly: I never once sat down to it without falling asleep. The historical content was bland and much of it was not even about the mineral itself. Kurlansky wandered off topic throughout the entire book and continued to go on random tangents about wars and foods unrelated to salt's pivotal role in the history of the world throughout the exposition. I would never recommend this book to anyone, unless of course I enjoyed watching them suffer for 450 pages on end.

Mark Kurlansky has written several very interesting & informative books (Salt, Cod, The Big Oyster).

My frustration is that he needs to brush up his grammar as well as his sentence, paragraph, and chapter constructions; he lacks the very basics that I myself learned in high school English class in the 1960's! Specifically: he uses double prepositions ('off of' is everywhere), ends sentences with prepositions, promulgates run-on sentences as well as obscure subject/object interfaces, etc. The time-lines jump around horribly and he refers to geographical areas without displaying maps to support them; e.g., a whole chapter about salt in France without a single map with the specific towns/areas shown! I must wonder who edited the books ... surely a good editor would have caught and fixed these glaring errors.

You can compare his work with the writing styles of REALLY good non-fiction writers Simon Winchester, Charles M Mann, Robert K Massie, and David McCullough, who manage to be equally informative and their presentations are so much more polished!

Lots of people reviewed this before me so take a look inside, then make up your own mind.

P.20 "In China soybeans were added to ferment with the fish, and in time the fish was dropped altogether from the recipe and jiang became jiangyou, or as it is called in the West, soy sauce. The process by which the Chinese, and later the Japanese, fermented beans in earthen pots is today known as lactic acid fermentation, or pickling. As vegetables begin to rot, the sugars break down and produce lactic acid, which serves as a preservative. Theoretically, pickling can be accomplished without salt, but the carbohydrates and proteins in the vegetables tend to putrefy too quickly to be saved by the emerging lactic acid. Without salt, yeast forms and the fermentation process leads to alcohol rather than pickles. In Sichuan, pickled vegetables are still a staple. They are served with rice." (You may have had this as a black seaweed wrapped appetizer called sushi and is in most grocery stores.)

If you have traveled to Salzburg or the Salzkammergut region of Austria, you know about the salt mines. In 1573 the body of a Celt was found- well preserved by the salt air deep in a salt mine and dated to 400 BC. The author then takes you back in history to when the Celts inhabited this region and others. Then through the Roman era when soldiers were paid in salt. (I did not have any problem following the flow of history but obviously other reviewers have a hard time with history. If you remember James Burke's Connections series, this book is just like that.)

Venice began with salt-producing evaporation ponds. They moved on to the spice trade. That is part of Kurlansky's The Rise and Fall of Spice Cities which is a great follow-up book to read. The salt story is more detailed in this book. Back to the story. Venice was founded by Romans who ate cheese.

P.96 "The difference between fresh cheese and aged cheese is salt. Italians call the curds that are eaten fresh before they begin to turn sour, ricotta, and it is made all over the peninsula in much the same way." (On my trip to Quebec I had poutine- which was curds on fries with a gravy.) "The earliest record of Parma cheese (Parmesan) that fits the modern description is from the 13th century." If you like to eat, read this book!

P.116 "All the fishing nations of northern Europe wanted to participate in the new, rapidly growing, extremely profitable salt cod market. They had the cod but they needed salt, and the vikings may have been pivotal in solving this problem as well." The author details the salt evaporation ponds. The story follows the Hanseatic League and its trade using salt.

Have you traveled to Hawaii or Alsace, France? They produced salt. Sauerkraut is made with salt and helped the British Navy prevent scurvy (P.150). There was a real problem during the Civil War when the South had limited salt supplies. Do you use Tabasco? Made in Louisiana using salt from underground there.

The Aztecs and Maya controlled the salt trade in Mexico and Central America. Part of the conflict between Spain and Britain was over salt-bearing cargo ships from the Caribbean Islands going to Europe.

Bottom line: If you like history stories or love to eat, you are going to like this book.

I picked up this book in an airport just before boarding a plane for the next several hours. I wasn't sure what to expect, but I love gastronomic history. This book has GREAT information and I learned a lot.

That said, I'm not sure how it was organized. As I was going through the book I felt like it was a constant shifting of time period and place. Usually an area touched upon would be come back to later in the book. Some time periods would be discussed multiple times. I kinda just wish that the book was organized one way or the other. Either track the history of salt in a region from antiquity to present, then move on to the next region, or, in an orderly fashion, start in antiquity and move the history forward for all regions at the same time. Just my opinion, take it with a grain of salt. (I couldn't help myself.)

For anyone who enjoys this book I would also recommend "The Taste of Conquest: The Rise and Fall of the Three Great Cities of Spice" by Michael Krondl

Kurlansky started the book with the Chinese's method of mining for salt. The book covers a wide range of stories on salt, its impact on fishery, its strategic value in times of war. Who would have thought that a compound so common caused war and revolutions. It is a very comprehensive book but, in my opinion, some of the recipe could be edited out to make a shorter book.

This book was an interesting conundrum. Usually, find myself slogging through a book, I'll drop it and move onto something else on my reading list. I found this book to be a slow read, but the information presented was so interesting that I didn't want to give up on it.

Salt has been interwoven with human society, civilization, politics, and history. The author presents a number of ways in which salt was instrumental at different points in history, and the information presented is thought-provoking.

I've been doing some thinking about why I found this book such a hard read, even though I found the information interesting. I think the answer is that the information is mostly disjointed, leaving the reader to shift gears abruptly as we bounce from topic to topic.

I'm not sorry that I read the book, and I may refer to it in the future, but I will almost certainly not read it again.

One of the best books of history and food preservation I've read. Provides a good explanation of the role of salt in world power and finance. Provides anecdotal information backed up with footnotes and sources.

Interesting reading! Several fine maps and illustrations. Provides a lot of pre-Columbian and American information that was new to me.

Provides relevant cost data for the eras covered. Discusses the role of politics, religion, ecology, and preference in the development and decline of the salt business.

A very scholarly and entertaining work on an important strategic commodity.

I read it twice, and found that I'd missed several important points the first time. There's lot of information packed into 449 pages.

A must for anyone studying food preservation, world trade, or history.

A good book for anyone.

The book tells the story of salt throughout world history: how it was made, how it was traded, how it was used, and the effect the salt industry has had on villages, cities, and regions.
The book starts and ends in China, first describing the brine wells and the advanced drilling techniques the Chinese invented centuries ago. The text then moves to how salt was used in Roman times describing a sauce called garum made from pickled and fermented fish parts. Kurlansky then continues with Mediteranean fish industry. Salt's main use was in preserving fish. The next big change came when cod was found off the coast of Newfoundland. Cod's low fat meant more salt was needed.
Eventually, the American colonies developed their own salt and cod industries. Kurlansky describes the importance of salt in the American Civil War, how salt works led to the marketing of Tabasco sauce, how canals were dug through New York state to take salt from the Great Lakes to the coast.
After a quick recounting of how salt was used by Ghandi to spark India's revolution, the book ends back in China and how the salt industry there has moved into the modern age. The old traditional derricks are gone; no one wanted to pay to preserve even the most important ones as historical landmarks.
Kurlanski gives a good outline of how salt was taxed in various parts of the world. His description of how the salt tax was an important factor in both the French and Indian revolutions deserves special mention.
As he describes how salt was traded and produced, Kurlanky peppers his narrative (sorry...) with short recipes that illustrate how salt was used in different parts of the world and at different times of our history.
If you love food and history, you'll love this book. If you love one and only moderately like the other, you'll find the book bogs down a bit.

For the longest time, history in the Western genre was defined in terms of heroes (and the occasional heroines) and their nemesis. This "great man" version of history glorified individuals like Churchill, Caesar, Alexander, Napeleon, Washington, Constantine, Lincoln, Peter the Great, etc, etc... In the late 20th century, a new hot phrase has hit the social sciences: sustainable societies. Accompanied by recent advances in analytical techniques, scientists are now combing back through history with an eye on how human societies are affected by nature, and affect nature in turn. This in turn has spawned a new genre of historical literature that emphasizes man's relations to various objects in his natural environment. Typical works include "Guns, germs and steel", "History of the World in Six Glasses", "La Diva Nicotina", "Botany of Desire" etc, etc... A great example of this genre is this book by Mark Kurlansky, "Salt: A World History".

Written as a series of short chapters, this book traces the role of salt in the development of human societies around the world over the centuries. The book shows how the use of salt allowed food preservation to become entrenched within human society. This in turn increases survival rates of human communities throughout the whole calendar year, which in turn increased population densities and fostered the growth of culture. The book also shows how the importance of salt was reflected in its numerous uses; i.e money, signal of natural gas, etc...

Each chapter is readable in under an hour, and the whole book is readable in one weekend. The book is very interseting, and contains many interesting and often subtle facts. I highly recommend it.

I confess that I picked up this book for all the wrong reasons. In the Dimension Jump episode of Red Dwarf, our heroes are trying to force themselves to relax by reading the inflight magazine. The articles that they are reading include Classic Wines of Estonia, Flemish Weaving the Traditional Way and, of course, Salt: An Epicures Delight.

If you want a brief introduction to salt history, I recommend reading Chapter 2 Salt: The Edible Rock in Margaret Visser's classic Much Depends on Dinner. If you want to go all the way and are prepared to read 400 plus pages on the subject, then Mark Kurlansky's book is the way to go. You will learn about how salt has affected and directed the course of history, from leading to the establishment of trade routes and cities, to provoking and financing wars.

The book is entertaining and contains a remarkable amount of information. However, even though I am a "history person", I found myself struggling a bit too much to keep on going, and this is why I am taking away one star.

We pick up the salt shaker and spice our food, or avoid the shaker like the plague, but usually don't give a second thought about the salt. Sure, we learn about the use of spices and salt to preserve food in the past, but we don't appreciate the political and sociological role salt has played in world history. Kurlansky has taken up the task and written a very readable and enjoyable history of the world and how salt has played a role. Salt taxes and control of the salt trade were more important for political and economic reasons than I realized. Countries rose and fell and filled their treasuries through salt. Salt was an instrumental player in Gandhi's independence movement in India. The gastronomic role is amply portrayed by quoting recipes and food writing throughout the ages. Salt is a mover as well as a shaker.
The book sometimes is hampered by the author's scope - he wants to focus on salt used for eating but has to open the door to other forms of salt used for gunpowder, and de-icing. These asides say "well there is more but we're not going to touch that really," and limit the history portrayed in the book. He also spends a lot of time bringing the past alive, but once he treats the 20th century in the last part of the book, the story bogs down and goes a bit flat. It would have been nice to expand and look more at the sociological and economic impact the anti-sodium movement of the 20th century had upon the salt economy. Overall he seems to say that as modernization came into play, salt got less interesting, and that is reflected in the interest level of his writing.
Despite this, the book is very interesting look into something that we take for granted in our lives today.

Mark Kurlansky has written a witty and erudite history of mankind's love affair with salt. From Lake Yuncheng 8,000 years ago in what is now modern-day China to the fine granular perfection of a box of Morton's, Kurlansky uses salt as a lens through which to view the development of technology and nations. He ends the book with the not un-ironic recognition of what took eighty centuries to achieve -- abundant, perfect white salt -- is now common, cheap and disdained.
This is an informal and amusing book, filled with what seems solid research and clear thinking. Half history and half food writing, Kurlansky visits Portugese cod-fishing fleets and Roman salt mines, ancient Asian saltworks and Edmund McIlhenny's salt island in New Iberia Parish, Louisiana. He uses the repeated cycles of history to visit certain recurring themes: a human's need for salt making them vulnerable to taxation, and thence rebellion, as well as the growth of technologies, particularly drilling technologies, spurred by the need for, and want of, salt.
Today, with blast freezers, refrigerated truck lines and jets that can move fresh seafood around the world, we have forgotten just how critical salt once was. Nowadays we can tinker with our salt intake and question its affect on health, but for men and women laboring under the sun in salt-poor regions, it was life itself. Kurlansky remninds us of these things, and how the humble white crystal has been part of our development as a civilization.

This book is an excellent, engaging read. It takes you back in time to Ancient Egypt, Greece, China and Maya kingdoms and tells you how salt, equally precious as spice, shaped economy and civilization. My only reader's peeve is that the author has NOTHING to say about history of salt-making in Russia, I don't know why, I do doubt it was due to lack of information, more to ignorance of the whole continent?
So the books has no right to be called WORLD history in my eyes since it ignores a large territory of contemporary Russia, the territory I was very much interested how salt was produced there during hundreds of years; otherwise the author covers the subject perfectly and is full of facts you'd like to quote to your friends when sharing some cheese, wine, anchovi, olive or caviar.

Whilst reading Mark Kurlansky's "SALT: A WORLD HISTORY", when I would mention to someone what I was currently reading I would be met with a sort of dismissive, "Ooo-kay, well, whatever", sort of attitude. Then I would start rattling off some of the salt factoids that I had come across to show that the topic is somewhat more interesting than some of us might think. After all, most of us just take salt for granted and don't even think of where it comes from before it gets to the shaker on the table, as well as all the many uses people have had for salt throughout history. This book is liberally salted throughout with salt facts and stories and things related to salt. However, keep in mind that this is merely light easy reading that barely touches the surface of the topic. It is not a scholarly tome intended for research. As the author points out in his acknowledgments, the New York Public Library alone has over 1000 books about salt. This book is kind of a Reader's Digest version on the topic intended for entertainment and perhaps to tweak a curiousity to do further investigation. It's a fun read, but I kept craving salted fish while I was reading the book.

I learned a lot about salt from reading this book. Salt has been a symbol of preservation, power, oppression, health and wealth. Kurlansky takes the reader for a trip around the world to places like China, England, India the Middle East, and all over Europe to show how salt was found, made, used and valued.
There are all kinds of information in this book. Salt was used to not only preserve food and also human bodies. Salt was used to make gunpowder. It has also been used to deice roads in the United States. Ancient people in China and Egypt got salt by evaporating seawater. People in Mexico evaporated urine and burned plants to extract salt. I learned a lot about geography and places like Parma and the Po River in Italy where Parma cheese was first made. I learned that the area around the Dead Sea was not only a great source of salt, but also a tourist attraction with hotels and health spas.
I did not know people died for salt in the Civil War. Millions of slaves died making salt in mines and wells. The South actually lost the war because it could not produce enough salt to feed their armies. Making salt was a way to actually avoid military service. Salt became a symbol for all the injustices of government. By the late 18th century more than 3000 French men women or children were sentenced to prison or even death for crimes like smuggling against the salt tax called the gabelle. Women hid salt in their breasts, clothing, and even their posteriors. Smuggling was also widespread in China where the salt smuggler was seen as a hero fighting the evil salt administration. The gardens of one Chinese province has become a tourist attraction because of the salt smugglers. The British controlled the use, production, and the cost of salt in India until Gandhi's historic salt march in 1930 in which he defied British law by merely picking up some salt off a beach.
This book is also filled with many interesting recipes using salt with ingredients like sauerkraut, anchovies, salted beef, and honey. This is a wonderful book, because it covers so many interesting subjects. This book makes salt fascinating.

In this book, Kurlansky attempts to do for salt what he did for cod in his book about the fish the changed the world. Salt seems a broader topic, though one whose historical impact is less unified. This gives the book a rather disjointed aspect, as though we need jump through each culture's perspective and history in making, acquiring and using salt. While various themes do emerge, Kurlansky seems more taken with the project of finding interesting and flavourful anecdotes to fill the pages and hold the reader's interest. He is mostly successful, from the story of prehistorical miners perfectly preserved in salt to the role that salt played in the development of American history. There are very few bases that he does not appear to touch, but nevertheless the story is never quite so cohesive as to justify this especially meandering approach. Despite this, I have been annoying my friends and relatives for weeks with the sorts of salty nuggets that Kurlansky often uncovers. There are, it seems, a million and one things you can do with brine. Unfortunately, Kurlansky never really develops a sense of what is magical and special about salt - it's transformative properties. Why does it preserve so well? Why does it change dull food into the gourmet? And why this particular fascination with salt through human history? Kurlansky often seems like an accountant searching for something valuable along the salt trail. He often succeeds and these stories can be quite fascinating, but unlike his history of cod, the story never comes together. The history of salt is really just the history of a chemical and though in many respects it is fascinating in its own right, its own right is really not as expansive or inclusive as Kurlansky would have us believe.
These complaints are not, however, quite so deep as they sound. The book is consistently interesting and well-written throughout. Kurlansky has mastered clear and articulate non-fiction writing. He never stays too long on a subject, and finds interest in each of his digression. I would recommend his book on cod and his excellent, if uneven, collection of short stories before tackling this one, but it is, in the end, certainly worth getting to.

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.

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.

Where would we be without salt? Certainly our french fries would be blander, but actually salt has had a critical role in our history as Kurlansky describes in this uneven but generally good book.
In a roundabout way, we are taken from ancient times to the present and throughout the world to see how salt has had an impact on our civilization. At one time so valuable that people were paid with it (from which we get the salt-based word salary), salt was essential for preserving food in an era before refrigeration. It was a cause of wars and a factor in victory and defeat.
The book's biggest flaw is that it is not well-organized. Although generally moving from past to present, Kurlansky skips back and forth in time and place in a somewhat aggravating manner. In a non-fiction work, the reader should have a better sense of direction. In addition, at times Kurlansky overstates the importance of salt: certainly, salt helped dictate where cities would be located, but it is not the dominant factor he makes it out to be; other items such as water and wood also played a role.
Overall, however, this is a decently written and informative book, an off-beat way to look at history. Even if it meanders a little too much, it does eventually get to its destination and you will be educated and entertained in the process.

Someone actually wrote a whole book about Salt, as in the mineral, and it was actually pretty good. Mark Kurlansky takes us through the history of salt and humans love of it. The language was easy and the story telling was not boring. There was a little bit rambling here and there but overall it was well done and made reading about salt interesting. For a topic that we usually don’t dwell it was very educational and worth the read.

Mark Kurlansky might qualify as popular as far as readers of history are concerned. He has written diverse historical works focusing on cod fish, the Basque people, and most recently the history of Rock and Roll. His work is more effective when he reports on the individual segments that make up history, than when he tries to tie together and interpret those threads of time. The history of salt is thus a perfect subject for Kurlansky's talents. Salt is found all over the world, is critical to all animal life, and has been the object of many separate struggles for survival.
You have to appreciate studying history to really enjoy this book. If you do, "Salt" is a wonderfully written modern historical narrative. Twenty-six separate chapters take you all over the world and throughout time, showing salt as a simple material necessary for survival, to a commodity controlled by the powerful, to the chemical that allows for better food storage and preservation, thus helping to feed more and more of civilization. Some chapters demonstrate how important different commodities are on culture. Until I read this book, I had no idea that the 20th Century Gandhi-inspired revolution in India was rooted in protest over British ownership of Indian salt rights. Each section averages fifteen pages bringing an interesting collection of salt related facts and reports.
Lots of salt history revolves around food. When you studied history as a youngster, you didn't think about how feeding civilization was the critical factor is what happened out in the world. If food could be preserved longer when abundant, if it tasted better when eaten, and had all the nutrients needed for survival, the quality of life improved and civilization would likely expand. When armies moved forth, they had to be fed too, so more food was needed as human expansion continued. Time and time again salt played a large role in what peoples went where, what they did, and why they stayed or moved on.
The book seems long, but reads quickly; it is easy to pick up and put down at frequent intervals. The chapters are short and each one weaves smaller story segments into the chapter's theme. There are opportunities to learn new facts, as well as different interpretations of familiar historical events to be absorbed. I most accurately rate this book at 4.20 stars out of 5.00, rounded down to 4 stars; it was an enjoyable and fun book.

Rarely have I found nearly all of the positive and negative aspects noted in reviews of a book to apply to my experience. This book is a case where that is so.

Some wrote in these reviews that this book put them to sleep. My wife, who bought the book for herself, gave it to me to read because I was having trouble sleeping. It didn't help me sleep. But it was boring. Reading Kurlansky's book was like being attracted to watching ants work.

For example, the story of how salt was valued and used by a people in previous times is told for the people of pre-Christian times, for the Chinese, Mongolians, Celtics, Franks, Arabs, Phoenicians, South American natives, and well you get the picture. It's the same story told over and over again.

A similar example, is that recipes for how each of these peoples preserved meat and spiced food are given from the records they left. It's like watching a program on the Food Channel in English, then watching the same program in Dutch, then in Chinese, and well you get the picture.

Yet other reviewers noted that there is a real important story that Kurlansky tells - how salt was significant in the lives of humans before refrigeration and canning. The importance of that use is related in terms of customs policies, trade routes, and the hazards of a shortfall of salt. Salt, used as a preservative, allowed a people deficient in meat or fish to trade with others who grew the crops to raise stock animals or were located on an ocean. For example, Vikings traveled to the waters around the NE Atlantic to fish for cod which they could use at home or use as a trade good. But without salt as a preservative, this was a non-starter for their people -- the fish would spoil before they returned home. So they shipped salt, purchased from elsewhere in Northern Europe, on their outbound journey to Greenland, and shipped salted fish home as the return journey.

Another story Kurlansky tells is how salt was a strategic issue in the American Civil War - the North had lots (no pun), the South had little. Yes, cotton was a strategic material; so was salt. Saltworks were tactical objectives of armies. Who knew?

Author Kurlansky handles the science behind sodium chloride in a superficial manner, but maybe he wants his book to be about people and food. I would have liked more science.

I read the whole book. Author Kurlansky is easy to read. I am glad I did. I learned much I hadn't known, and much also I didn't want to know. Could this book be done in 50 to 100 pages, sure. But then maybe no one would have published it.

Three stars, because there isn't a two and one-half rating.

On a macro level world history�that is, human history-concerns four basic forces which�separately or in combination�have shaped human behavior: the forces of nature, the force of a dominate personality, the force of ideas, and covetousness, for land, power, weathh�whatever.
The subtitle of this book is A World History. The title is deserved for the history of mans quest for salt is in many ways a wonderful mechanism of microcosm for the greater spectrum of world history.
This is by no means to only major �commodity� history around�there have been other recent books about the potato, sugar, coffee, gold, jade, porcelain, various dyes (mauve, indigo), nutmeg and sundry other spices over the past several years.. At their worst, these commodity histories are complacent annals of consumption; at their best, they up-end our ideas of history's motive forces.
Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky ranks among the very best.
Salt isn't just a seasoning, it's a life substance, vital to the proper functioning of the human body. For as long as there have been humans, they've had to find or create salt to live. The history of salt is the history of humanity.
This is, in actuality, several books in one: a food history, a recipe book, a travelogue and a cultural history. It contains images which will long stay with you: the body of a Bavarian salt miner prized from collapsed salt caves centuries after his death, for instance, perfectly preserved right down to the bright colors of his clothes. It is also stylishly written and wonderfully learned, covering a vast geographical and historical span. William Blake famously suggested that the world was to be seen in a grain of sand; Kurlansky has seen it in a grain of salt.
Every piece of evidence in this book is arranged to point to salt as an agency of enormous power. It has determined the geography of warfare, urban growth (almost all Italian cities were built near a saltworks) and most of the world's trade routes. Kurlansky even links the 'whimsical, non-geometric' pattern of North America's secondary roads to salt: 'The roads are simply widened footpaths and trails... originally cut by animals looking for salt.' These are the salt-lines of history, invisible on a map but brought beautifully to light by Kurlansky.
The book is broadly chronological. We begin at a salt works in ancient China and end nearly 500 pages later amid the health wars over salt in the twenty-first century. Along the way, the reader is rewarded with superb thumbnail histories of the world's main civilizations; digressions into ketchup, chilli pepper, olives, embalming techniques, pickling and mustard gas; dozens of salty recipes; a beautiful little essay on Matisse, fauvism and anchovy fishermen.
This is a truly wonderful book. However, it shoulkd be noted that it is not as good as Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World. Cod was an ecological novel. Infused with a sadness for the passing of the cod, that book was a heartfelt elegy for that wonderful creature. Salt is a mineral. The previous work was both an emotional and intellectual triumph. This is an intellectual triumph. This is a function of the subject matter rather than any deficiency on Kurlansky's part. However, there is a distinct difference in the reading experience between the two books readers of Cod ought to be cognizant of.
Moreover, Kurlansky's latest lacks this unifying attitude and occasionally lapses into a rather boring occasional recital of statistics and factoids.
But those are quibbles�this is a great book.
Spice up your life�take on this giant size helping of salt!

Salt, before reading this book I hadn't really paid any attention to it. Yeah I buy iodized salt to prevent goiter. But I never knew why Morton table salt didn't clump from moisture. And I knew about the camels carrying salt blocks in the desert of North Africa. But with the ocean being full of it, I didn't think that at anytime would it have been a rare commodity. This book does a pretty good job of tying world events to this edible rock. I also read Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World and I liked that book better. They both try to tie a single thing into a world history narrative and Cod does a better job of it. But I did enjoy reading this book, and if world energy prices rise, so too will the cost of salt.

Recommended.

I picked this up on a lark (as audiobook) to fill my commute during NPR's pledge week. I was surprised at how long and detailed the book was. I had no idea there was so much to say about such a simple substance.

The book drove home the fact that we take cheap, pure salt for granted. The author reminds us that for the bulk of history, salt was scarce, expensive and vital to our very survival for its ability to preserve food.

The breadth of the book is astounding. The author covers salt making and salt uses from China to Europe to the New World and from pre-history to modern times. He fills the book with a sense for how the importance of salt changed over that time and how policies about salt (such as the various salt taxes) affected history. The section on the role of salt policy in Ghandi's liberation of India was especially compelling.

He also filled the book with recipes illustrating the ways that salt was used in various cultures. Some made me quite hungry. Others were surprising in the flavor combinations - not tastes that we think of working together today.

The author does wander around a bit, jumping back and forth through time and occassionally diverting from table salt (sodium chloride) to all the other chemicals technically known as salts. But overall, the flow and pacing of the book are good. Toward the end, he spent more time in picturesque descriptions of places, in one case noting the colors of the whisteria on the walls, and drifting from the main theme of salt. A serious student would probably want those asides trimmed away. For a casual reader, they were pleasant and only mildly distracting.

Overall, this got me through Pledge Week and more. It was a compelling listen.

Salt is a multidisciplinary historical look at salt, a material closely tied to civilization. As its title claims, it is a history of the world from the perspective of salt. The book is hard to put down with attention grabbing chapters such as �Salt�s Salad Days,� �The Leaving of Liverpool,� �The Odium of Sodium,� �Big salt, Little Salt� and �The War Between the Salts.� Since the author has received an award for excellence in food writing, it should come as no surprise that the text contains its share of historical recipes.
In the course of the book we are introduced to an astonishing range of cultures and visit many areas where salt has been found and harvested. From Egypt to China, Rome and the Celts, India, Africa and America, the story moves back and forth, skipping between time periods and cultures. The reader is assisted in the journey by well-drawn maps. I especially enjoyed learning about the many ways salt has been harvested, from the sea, evaporating brines or mining rock salt. I also was intrigued by the influence of salt on fields diverse as economics, taxes, politics and technology. For example, we learn about how Gandhi and Indian independence got its start in rebellion against oppressive salt taxes leveled on the Indians so that British salt makers would have a market for their surplus salt.
In the book we meet salt-connected people like Li Bing, governor of what is now Sichuan in 250 B.C.E. and a hydraulic engineering genius. Besides building the world�s first large scale dam for flood control and irrigation, and opening up central China for widespread agriculture, Li Bing was the first to drill for salt brine. The author shows how this naturally led to our geologic understanding of salt domes and eventually how to drill for oil in such domes. At this time the Chinese became the first to tax salt and attempt to fix its price, something hard to do with such a cheap and readily available material.
It is in his slant towards food that the author is most comfortable, talking about the many ways salt and food intersect. We and introduced to salt and food preservation, spices and flavorings, sour kraut and salted meat, fish and fishing, even the harvesting and production of caviar. There are two chapters on Avery Island in Louisiana, the first on salt mining by the Avery family which supplied much of the Confederacy�s salt, the second on Edmund McIlhenny combining two products of the island � hot chili peppers and salt � to make Tabasco sauce.
The book appears to randomly skip around between cultures and time periods, visiting China and America several times. It also ignores any time period later than mid twentieth century and does little with modern, nonfood uses of salt. The author gives no citations or footnotes for his many quotes or facts, relying instead on a fairly extensive bibliography including books and a few articles. While he talks about the science of salt in parts of a few chapters, I would have liked to learn more. He does fairly well with the changes in technology involved with salt. While I enjoyed reading the book it left me with many historical and scientific questions unanswered. Its real strength is in describing the historical relationship between salt and food. I found it pleasant to read.

"Salt; A World History," by Mark Kurlansky is a meticulously researched account of how trade in salt...and salted foods shaped global economies for centuries. The production of salt powered empires. Moreover, the salting of fish, fowl and hams fed soldiers and sailors for extended periods...allowing for the expansion of trade and military empires.

The Roman Empire required salt for its soldiers and at times soldiers were paid in salt...which was the origin of the word "salary"...and the expression "worth his salt" or "earning his salt," according to Kurlansky. After the fall of Rome, Venice became the dominant commerical force in Europe. To this end, salt trade maintained Venice's palatial public building and the complex hydralic system that prevented the metropolis from washing away.

Soon farmers in France discovered that curdled milk drained and preserved in salt made many different types of cheese. In Parma, Italy the production of salted "Prosciutto" ham and "Parmesan" cheese made the city famous. The same thing happened with the production of salted "Salami" in Felino and Genoa, Italy. However, a major factor in the prodcution of salted fish was the Medieval Roman Catholic Church's decision to forbide the eating of meat on religious days and the Lenten fast (40 days) and all Fridays. This was serious business...under English law at the time the penalty for eating meat on Friday was hanging. Consequently, trade in dried fish boomed...especially for Northern Cod, which had a white flesh with little fat (fat resists salt) and dried easily.

Page after page of this book is filled with significant historical information on how salt impacted economies especially with sea vessels and river steamboats. The author also includes little tid-bits of information about the develpment of our language...particularly the origin of expressions. For instance, when early American settlers hunted they would leave red herring along the trail because the strong smell would confuse wolves which is the origin of the expression "red herring," meaning..."false trail." Finally, Kurlansky explains that "Generals from George Washington to Napoleon discovered without salt...war is a desperate situation...salt was needed to treat wounds, preserve food for soldiers and for the diet of the calvary's horses." Recommended.

Bert Ruiz

Salt comes from the only family of rocks eaten by humans. Chloride is essentisal for digestion and respiration. Sodium, which the body, we learn, cannot manufacture, is necessary for the body to to transport nutrients and move muscles, such as the heart.

Mark Kurlansky has written the definitive history of salt, laden with recipes, many of which are repulsive to the modern American taste, but were once a staple part of the diet.

Salt is essential to human and animal life. Wrs hsve been fought over salt and the loss of the British Empire began with a protest over the tax on salt.

That Kurlansky can make the history of what is now a common commodity fascinating over 452 pages is a credit to his skill. Every page brings to light new facts for the reader and where discovery lacks, Kurlansky plunks in a recipe. Overall, "Salt: A World History" should be required reading for American public school teachers so they emight be able to grasp both the beauty and importance of a knowledge of history - and then be given to their students to read and study instead of pap about "self-esteem" and "diversity".

Salt is the world and Kurlansky looks into almost every culture and the nations they gave birth to for his history. It is truly and amazing work and even those with little interest in history would benefit from reading it.

"Salt: A World History" so intrigued me in Kurlansky's skills that I now intend to read his history about cod, the fish that changed the world.

Jerry

I gave this book five stars because I found it absolutely fascinating. It didn't bother me that it went all over the world and back a few times. I felt that it did, actually, hang together, as in the various instances when Americans would invent something useful to the salt industry but, as it turns out, the Chinese had already invented it a couple thousand years before.
I live in a town that was the most important salt-producing area in the United States for many years. It could be said that the Civil War was won with Syracuse-Salina-Liverpool, New York salt. I also learned that the village of Liverpool was so named because boxes of high-quality salt were being shipped around the world from Liverpool, England... and the salt manufacturers here wanted to ship out boxes of salt labeled "Liverpool Salt"! I don't know whether or not it's comforting to realize that both branding and fraud were aspects in the naming of this village over 150 years ago.
I wonder, however, about possible inaccuracies, as pointed out by another reviewer. I have lived here much of my life, but have never heard this version of the naming of our town. The village website claims to not know the exact reason for the name. So, perhaps we need to take some parts of this book with a grain of salt. With that in mind, however, this book is entertaining and deliciously long for those whose attention span hasn't been artificially shortened by too much TV.

"Salt" is a wonderful collection of historical facts and anecdotes having to do with salt: its discovery, its uses, and the part it has played in world events. The book reminds me of James Burke's series of books and TV productions,Connections and Connections 1 (5 - Disc Set) as it seems to use a similar format. While Burke carries his story from event to event, showing how technological and scientific advances move forward together in tandem, this author shows how a single thing like salt can effect how history itself moves forward. Burke's narrative carries the reader/viewer from some intersting events or discoveries in the past and shows how these arrrived at some historic end point, usually something significant in modern day life. He often then loops it back again to show how the end product is linked in some interesting way to its beginning through various important people. With this author, Mark Kurlansky, a single item important to humankind since early times, salt, is studied as to its effects on history throughout the world. While salt gives the reader a central theme, there is a more branching character to its story.

If nothing else, "Salt" certainly highlights the fact that control over a commodity that was essential to food preservation brought about both power and eventual disaster in many cultures. As a good example it appears that the selfish manipulation of salt prices through taxation for the benefity of certain people brought both the British Empire in India and the French monarchy down, each in its own turn. That something so ubiquitous could be turned into a scarce commodity by hedging in its production, importation, or possession reveals just how much market is driven by the machinations of powerbrokers--makes one wonder how much of the current petroleum crisis arises from similar manipulation.

The author covers early salt working in countries as divergent as China and Timbuktu, the Americas and Germany. Amazingly he manages to bring in some very interesting bits of information as well. He discusses early China's amazing record of technological advances--some even occurring thousands of years B.C.--and the discovery of the Urumchi mummies,The Mummies of Urumchi, with their apparent Celtic affinities, who appear in the Taklimakan Desert. His discussion of the impact of the unmet salt demands in the American South during the Civil War on the outcome of that conflict makes exciting reading. Interesting too are some of the early recipes for dishes that featured salt preserved items, some deriving from early Roman chefs and some from time honored Chinese culinary artists among others.

While salt is biologically necessary for humans to survive--a colorful story from the early explorers of the the store tells of salt deprived explorers suffering from hyponatremia, convulsions and death--most of us derive more than sufficient salt from the food we eat. We get almost more than we need from many of the canned foods we eat, and if we are inclined to eat processed foods we're pushing ourselves to the risk of hypertension. What made salt such a necessary commodity previous to modern refridgeration and canning techniques was the need to preserve food for prolonged periods of time, either when fresh food was not available or when food needed to be transported to distant markets. This is what drove the demand for salt and if the author is to believed, shaped human history.

Intriguing book.

First-Before you berate me for my negativity towards a book I didn’t need to read, note this: I read it under duress. It was this month’s pick for my book club.

Second-I follow the store.com’s rating system, which isn’t completely fair to the book itself. Three stars, “It was okay,” is how I felt about it. That does but should not, in fairness, take away from the fact that it is exhaustively researched and, for anyone as obsessed with salt as the author, an amazing, informative book on the subject.

As an historically challenged person, I found this book about as interesting as one I read earlier this year entitled (I am not kidding)…Rust.
After acquiring an unusual chunk of fancy salt, author Mark Kurlansky became obsessed. Salt A World History is just that: the history of salt, its use in the preservation of bodies (interesting) and food, old recipes that call for its use, production of the substance (for example, evaporating liquid containing salt in various ways), locations it has been found (like the Dead Sea), names of a bunch of cities that start with “Sal” (Salzburg, for example) which, apparently means “salt,” and explanations of sayings like, “Worth his salt.” In summary, salt lovers, especially those who are fans of history, will appreciate and enjoy this book. Others…steer clear. Best of the book for this (historically challenged reader): science-related sections. Worst…ancient recipes. Better: The Mushroom Hunters by Langdon Cook, The Wright Brothers by David McCoullough and Gathering Moss by Robin Wall Kimmerer.

While the book does not follow a "narrative" format, and occasionally changes places and times without warning, I none the less give it an unreserved recomendation! More wars, trades, and other history shaping events have happened because of salt than almost any other substance, and salt has been crtical in trade, and warfare, throughout history. I learned more about places and events I *thought* I was familiar with than I would have thought possible.

If you are a history fan, a trivia fan, or a socialogy buff, then this book will delight you. If you are a student of the dark or middle ages, or the Renaisance, then consider this book on the "must buy" list. Naturally any cooks will find this a fascinating insight into one of the most widely used ingredients in the world.

The author's other books are also excellent, and if you like *this* book then the book "Women's Work, the First 20,000 Years" will be of interest as well, since they mention many of the same places and events.

There is no question that "Salt" written by Mark Kurlansky is a well-researched fact filled book. And I agree with fellow reviewers that it is quite amazing that someone could write a book about salt that spans well over 400 pages. However, the book is bogged down by these facts far too often, unless your chef and/or really love detailed history, the read will slow for most.

"Salt" is an ambitious book which chronicles salt from the dawn of human civilization to contemporary times. Broken into three sections, "Salt" starts with the importance of salt to our bodies as well as for preservation of food, mummies, etc., taking us from the dawn of man to the dawn of exploration. Part two explores salt as an international commodity and it's importance in the development of North America. While part 3 delves into the research and politics of salt with in the last 100 years or so.

Filled with many interesting nuggets of info that keeps you wanting more "Salt" is not a bad read it's just that those nuggets are too few and too far in-between for my taste.

Salt, by Mark Kurlansky, is a very well-written book. Kurlanksy presents his theory of salt being the essential ingredient to the world, and then supports it with much evidence. This evidence begins with the ancient history of salt foraging and trading, up to the 20th and 21st centuries and how salt impacted everyday life. Though the organization of information seems more sporadic and random than anything else, there is a general pattern of how salt affects people throughout the ages. Reading this book, one could compare the experience to reading a history textbook. With this said, those who do not enjoy history should stay away from this text. I myself chose Salt because I liked the idea of Salt being more than just a rock that we sprinkle on our food. Kurlanksy provides enough information to persuade me of this.
I came away from this book knowing much more about salt than I ever thought possible. So much information is shoved into this book that, at times, it can be overwhelming. But Kurlansky can normally sidestep this flaw by making the evidence interesting, even if it isn't always relevant. I liked the book, but did not love it, mostly because I didn't like how Kurlansky related what seemed like every single world event to salt. I felt that it went a little overboard at times, but I still liked the book in general, and would reccommend it only to people who enjoy history, because it is filled to the brim with it.

I have come to believe that you DO learn something with every new book. In this case, it is the extreme importance of salt as an empire-creating, nation-building, source of survival and yes, luxury. It is hard to imagine a world without salt. Indeed, the reason salt is rarely discussed in history books today is due to its ubiquity. If gold were as common as salt, it too would become a subject of relative unimportance.
Essentially, this is a presentation of salt from several angles, mostly historical. There is some science and health for the interested layman, some helpful illustrations and charts. Also the several old recipes are interesting in what they say and what they omit. It is the history that I found fascinating, the rise and fall of companies and empires based on this single commodity. A good, easy read.

History books are usually written about "big events" or "big men."

Salt, a World History is different. As the title implies, it focus on the most basic of all spices, salt. In amazing detail, covering many cultures and over two thousand years of history, the author, Mark Kurlansky, shows the reader the economic, political, and even military importance of salt.

By provding details such as the estimated per captia use of salt during the medieval ages, Kuralnsky shows us the cultural importance of salt. Such facts and figures may sound dull and boring, but for the most part, Kurlansky keeps the narrative interesting.

To further validate the cultural importance of salt, Kurlansky provides several recipes. However, even if they are sandwiched between interesting facts or anaylsis, recipes are boring to read. Too often, the narrative is interrupted, not enhanced, by the inclusion of a historical recipe.

The review on front cover clams that "Salt, a World History" is a "must have for any serious cook ..." However, this book is not a "must have" for any cook -- unless the cook happens to need a recipe for seventeenth century cabbage.

Still, "Salt, A World History" makes the case that the understanding the historical imporance of salt is just as imporant as understanding the life and times of Thomas Jefferson or the causes and effects of the French revolution.

A little known fact, but an important one that marks the undercurrent of this book. Salt was the first precious white powder; men killed for it, communities relied on it, trade routes were founded on it. This and many other facts are expounded upon by historian Mark Kurlansky. Written as a story as much as a standard history book, the author describes how the search for this compound, and the need to control its sources, determined much politics in the ancient world. Whether it was North Africa, Europe, the Middle East, or East Asia, the need to make food taste better and to preserve it, drove humans to great lengths to acquire salt. As such, salt was money in many places; hence the origin of the world salary, and the phrase "a man worth his salt". But alas, times change, and the book also shows how technological advances in the past 200 years have reduced the importance of this material. Now, man can even make his own salt using different elements of th Periodic Table. All in all, a great book, an interesting read, and a good lesson in history.

Salt is one of those things we never think about, except when we don't have it. In a way, that sums up what Kurlansky's book is all about--control of a substance that is ubiquitous. (Somewhat like oil, eh?)

As a historical compendium, Kurlansky's book excels. He covers all major empires, from Maya to Morton, and traces the various economic struggles over this essential mineral with an expert hand. The section on the Chinese was perhaps the most interesting of all in that it explains the economic basis of the world's first mercantile empire. But equally fascinating were the accounts of the ancient Maya (for whom the question "Whatever happened to the Maya?" is finally answered--the Toltecs showed up with cheap salt and broke their monopoly), the ancient Celts, who mined salt as far as Asia, and last but not least (considering that Morton is the world's #1 producer of salt), the U.S. Reading about the 19th century conversion of Syracuse, New York from "A place so desolate, it would make an owl weep to fly over it," into the premier salt mining hub of the country kept me on the edge of my seat, for I already knew how that sad story would end. (The beautiful salt-built Victorian mansions were torn down as part of the misguided Urban Renewal of the 60s; and the historic Erie Canal was transformed into a ten-mile strip of KFCs and dilapidated businesses.)

My sole critique of this book is the one I make of most journalists who attempt to write books--it lacks cohesion. While academics strive to organize their books around a central argument, journalists rarely feel that they need to make a point. The result is a book which has lots of interesting tidbits of information--even recipes!--but fails to structure them conceptually. As a result, some of the chapters are jumpy, moving from topic to topic without any defining idea.

But, taken as a whole, Salt is an excellent resource to anyone interested in following the economic history of one of the world's most facinating substances.

The history of a mineral...from ancient times to modern. This ought to be a boring book, right? But it isn't. The reason _Salt_ has received many poor reviews is not because it's boring. It's because it's full of mistakes.
To give this book 3 stars is charitable, but I DID enjoy large portions of the text and I learned some fascinating things. _Salt_ is a great starting point for research. If you read the book, you will almost certainly find interesting facts that you did not know before. However, before you quote these facts or commit yourself to them in print, be SURE to double check them in qualified sources, because, as other readers have noted, this book is riddled with errors.
To identify and discuss all these errors would probably require a book the size of _Salt_. I'll cite one good example here. Kurlansky criticizes Marco Polo for not mentioning the Chinese practice of minting paper money. It just so happened that I was reading Marco Polo alongside _Salt_, and Polo does in fact discuss Chinese paper money at length! Kurlansky's claim is simply not true. To further confuse matters, Kurlansky makes the claim after a list and discussion of legitimate Polo omissions. But he caps this discussion with the claim that Polo doesn't mention paper money, which is patently false. Polo more than mentions it. He mentions which towns use it and which towns don't and talks about it on and off for chapters.
So what is going on? To be fair, there are various manuscripts of Marco Polo's in existence, and I have only read one. Scholars believe that some of them were enlarged upon by the monks who copied them. Does Kurlansky perhaps have reason to believe that the "truest" version of Polo does not mention the paper money? If so, his decision to leave out this fact was at best presumptuous. At the least, he should have mentioned that only some manuscripts neglect the money. Instead, he made himself look a fool-as though he just didn't bother to read the book he cited.
Anyway, this is an example of the kind of thing he does over and over again. If you actually know something about the subject, you find he's not shooting straight. To be fair, many of these errors seem to occur when he's wandering off on a tangent. When he's sticking to his subject, he seems to hit nearer the mark. Still, his facts ought always to be double-checked. If you have the time and are sufficiently interested, read the book and double check anything you wish to cite. If you don't have lots of extra time, find another source.

Salt added to the diet is necessary to humans in an agricultural economy. Before refrigeration, it was also necessary as a preservative. Consequently, it has been a primary trade good, either by itself, or in the form of salted foods and sauces. It is therefore quite possible to look at the sweep of history by concentrating on the salt trade, and improvements in technology for acquiring or transporting salt, and get a unique and fascinating view. Remember the 3 way trade between Africa, the Caribbean and the American colonies? Salt even figured importantly in that. Kurlansky often provides peripheral information of high interest, and for those interested in cooking, there are a bunch of recipes from throughout history. I wish that Kurlansky had provided a little more detail on the science of food preservation. More of a concern is that Kurlansky has written an amazingly complete book. For the casual reader it can get to be too much, and I sometime found a need to skim, which is never fun.

This book was endlessly fascinating, if a little disjointed in the stories and areas in which Kurlansky chose to focus. Like other "commodity history" books, the author retells a lot of history through the particular lens of salt--the search for it, the effort to make and purify it, and the overtaking of technology that renders it less valuable in this modern era.

Kurlansky is a passionate researcher and a good writer. He has written books on different subjects, all of them characterized by a love for historical detail and a good writing style. He has written books on apparently trivial topics and in this book he choose to give importance and historically characterize an element of everydays gastronomy: salt. In the past, when refrigerators were no available, salting food was the most efficient way of preserving it. And obtaining salt from seawater is not as easy as one may imagine. For those reasons the history of salt is an interesting and surprising one. Kurlansky has focused on some special moments in the history of salt and has depicted its importance in economy and sociology as well as in food preparation and gastronomy. As a result the book may interest the historician as much as the food expert. The book is rich in trivia and never fails to surprise for the accuracy of information. For being a book about common kitchen salt this book is very long, but one can hardly blame the author for being so enthusiastic and complete in his excursus. This book is not memorable and is probably not going to change your life in any way, but is good and entertaining reading.

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!

As a fan of this kind of history and a cooking enthusiast, I found this book very enjoyable reading, and would recommend it to anyone considering it.

I do have minor concerns about the factual accuracy of two of the tangential assertions or facts that Kurlansky offers. Not having any expertise I trust the core material of his book is factually accurate. However finding even a few small tangential factual inaccuracies detracts somewhat from that trust.

On p. 63 Kurlansky suggests that the latin word for salt was the etymological ancestor of the word soldier, but dictionary and online lookups suggest this is an error and that "soldier" actually derives instead from solidus, a Roman gold coin.

On p. 266 Kurlansky offers "...to George Edward Pickett, who later reached the most northerly point of any confederate in combat when, on July 3, 1863 he led a ruinous charge up a sloping Pennsylvania field -- the climax of the battle of Gettysburg." Even on the Gettysburg battlefield the point of Pickett's charge is by not nearly the most northerly point of the battle, and while Gettysburg was the most northerly "major" battle, it was not the most northerly (recognized) battle involving confederate forces. That is near Athens, MO. And various other sites contend for the distinction of being more northerly but less involved levels of engagement (e.g. Buffington Island; sites in the Dakotas; St. Albans, VT; Calais, ME; etc.)

Outstanding book! I'm going to give it as a gift to all my relatives for Christmas. I am going to write a review of the book for our Mensa local publication, recommending it highly. One of the most interesting books I've ever read; really fills in the blanks in the world history.

One of the best books I have ever listened to. I thought it was going to be something dumb. Turned out to the be most enlightening and interesting book. The history and stories told are well worth listening too. I paid my kids a 100 bucks to read it. Shows the value of things and how they change over time and how ruthless societies can be to gain control of precious commodities. No Salt, you die....

The following is a review I posted on the weblog, The Literate Man ([...]), on April 29, 2010:

Who knew a book about a cooking condiment could be so exciting?

It's hard to imagine a world where salt is more than just a food complement, but for most of human history no element on earth has played a more critical role in society's evolution than sodium chloride. In the aptly named, Salt: A World History, author Mark Kurlansky paints a rich and fascinating portrait of salt's pivotal role in shaping the world as we know it.

Gold? Diamonds? Oil? All are mere historical footnotes compared with the role salt has occupied over the past five millennia of the human journey. In fact, until quite recently, salt was the most valuable commodity on the planet. Wars were waged, civilizations collapsed, and empires rose and fell as people throughout the ages sought to acquire this once scarce mineral. Salt has since shed its glamour with only the poorest and most backward countries still in the salt mining business and damning medical evidence curtailing its consumption. But Kurlansky transports us to a time when salt was the cornerstone of life and the epitome of opulence.

Transcending both time and space this running historical narrative takes us from China in 5,000 BC to England in the 19th century as this swift-paced tale unfolds. From the key ingredient in early animal domestication and antiseptic in Egyptian times, to soldier pay in Roman times, to a food preservative during the European Age of Exploration, salt has been humanity's companion and catalyst through the ages. It's done more than just spice up our food, harden our arteries, and provided us with witty sayings (ever wonder where the expression "salt of the earth" came from?) and that long forgotten and intriguing past is compellingly revealed in this 449-page ode to NaCl.

Kurlansky has a rare talent for making the mundane fascinating (he's also written mesmerizing biographical accounts of both the cod fish and the oyster) and his powers are at their greatest in this enthralling read. You'll never look at a salt shaker the same way again.

The previous reviewer Richard A. Mitchell nailed the problem with this book. It has no life. It was disapointing after reading Cod. The book is reems of trivia. Good for trivia hounds who wish to be salt geek experts, or for salt industry insiders, and people who live in Salt mine towns that want to know their history. For the general reader, there are interesting elements, but I think his approach to history hit gold with Cod and a dud with salt, the subject matter is just not that interesting historically for this length of a book. He covers so much ground, time and geographic, with such little depth on each, the only connection he can draw at the end is the irony that people sell a substance which is freely available -- a conclusion not exactly particular to salt or even that interesting or insightful.

Who knew that the everday kitchen compound we call salt was once a form of currency?

Mark Kurlansky did, and he painstakenly documented that and many other random facts in Salt: A World History. The book is detailed look at the crystalline compound we all know and love, from its early days as a form of high-value currency, to its present place in our kitchens, yards, and vocabulary.

I picked up the book because it, like its sister work Cod, was met with rave reviews and spent some time on the NYTimes best sellers list. Some of the highlights:

It's true that before it became commonplace in the home, salt was a highly-valued commodity, often used as currency. In a time before refrigeration and processed foods, salt was a critical component in food preservation, and was a high-priced luxury. In fact, salt cellars on the table were the sign of a wealthy home; they often took elaborate forms that today are considered valuable works of art.

Salt mines were so elaborate during the 1600s that royalty would descend t0 the mine's core where they would dine in rooms carved entirely from salt, view chapels carved out of salt rock, and use chandeliers carved from salt crystals.

In time, developments in agriculture and canning meant food could be produced and stored throughout the year, decreasing man's reliance on salt for preservation. And while it is no longer considered a high-priced or scarce resource, salt is still ingrained (ha) in our daily lives.

The human body needs salt to function; it helps muscles and nerves work, and regulates blood pressure.

Many common words in our vocabulary are derived from the word salt (or, the Latin sal, to be exact); among them:

* salad (originally, salted greens)

* salary (money given to Roman soldiers to buy salt)

* salacious (for years, salt was thought to be associated with fertility, and thus "salacious" and "salty" became synonyms for lustful)

* salami (seasoned sausage)

Anglo Saxons called a saltwork a wich, so many of the salt-producing towns in England earned names with the -wich suffix (e.g., Sandwich). (I'm not sure if our present day towns with this suffix trace their histories to salt-production, or are simply carry-overs of European names).

And there are thousands of other uses for the compound, like de-icing roads, cleaning tarnished silver, and relieving tired feed, to name a few.

So salt is a pretty fascinating substance. And while Kurlansky does a good job of bringing these things to light, I found his book tedious at times, and a bit unfocused. Mention of a particular salt-based cuisine, for example, spiralled into a discourse about the region of the world in which it was created, or a related crop or food product (e.g., talk of its early use in Chinese soy sauce led to a lengthy discussion about the soy bean, and Marco Polo's visit to Kublai Khan in China). No doubt intended to amplify the lowly compound's place in history, I found these tangents distracting from the story at hand.

Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky is a great book that unloads a huge amount of major and minor facts about salt. It seems salt was a major ingredient to world history. And, frankly, I don't know why some of these facts were not talked about in MY history classes.

The Roman Empire, the Chinese Empire, the powers of the Mediterranean all needed salt. Salt was used as money, it was taxed and traded. It was used to cure skins, mine for silver and preserve meats. Without salt farmers would have died out, many early wars would rarely have happened and many navies would have no reason to have existed. Without salt fish could not have been turned into wealth, many explorers would not have even bothered to leave port and many a King would still be in power. Salt was a major item, a rock as important as gold, giving and taking away wealth and power.

Salt is quite an interesting read, especially for those interested in history. It covers the majority of the world, indigenous peoples, China, Europe, European colonies such as the US and Caribbean islands, as well as modern techniques. It also covers other industries that salt affects, such as salt fish, cod, and other preserves and pickles, as well as a brief touch on natural gas and hot sauce. Salt is an easy read, the author uses plain language throughout. It doesn't require any prerequisite other than very basic history you learned in school. I recommend it very much!

"Salt: A World History" is exactly what the title advertises: stories about the production, trade, and use of salt from our earliest archaeological and written records through to modern times.

Kurlansky's writing is serviceable at best and more often rather clunky,repetitious, and tin-eared -- no one will ever accuse him of being a great prose stylist or a master storyteller. He doesn't have the most developed historical sense, which means that bits of information float in discreet units, bereft of context or full interpretation. And he has a *thing* about the Basques, which I have noticed turning up in his other work as well -- I think he tends to insert information he knows well (such as Basque history) into historical moments he's less sure of, so as to sound more knowledgeable than he perhaps truly is.

Nevertheless, the stories Kurlansky has to tell are fascinating enough to mostly overcome those difficulties. As a bonus, each chapter can more or less stand on its own, so you can space your reading in bite-sized chunks, as it were -- "Salt" is a great book to bring to a waiting room or on a bus ride.

In summary, "Salt" is an interesting book, but with too many flaws for me to recommend buying it. Borrow a copy from the library instead.

I read this book just after another "A History of the World in Six Glasses". "Salt" is a fascinating look at the power of this spice over the centuries and the historical events that occurred due to salt or that were somehow related to the value of salt. I highly recommend this work if you are interested in an historical look from a different angle. Be aware though that the author jumps around a bit and loses the reader in details at other times. But you have to say, Mark Kurlansky has certainly done his research!

This book earned me the UberDork rating from anyone I told about it, but they are the ones who missed out. The writing is clear and makes for fun snippet reading. (Got 10 minutes? Pick it up!) The useless but fun facts mentioned by another reviewer are a big part of what kept me reading, but I have to admit that the real attraction was how Kurlansky connected salt to so many locations through the centuries. I disagree that SALT wasn't organized; it simply takes a "global" approach, something which many people can't appreciate because they perceive history as a linear concept. Linear history is neat and clean, but misses the point that events evolve, appear and disappear no matter where you drop in on the so-called "timeline". It is more a bubbling stew than a piece of string, in my estimation, and explains the "repetitiveness" mentioned in other reviews. SALT has the kind of circular information that comes in so handy for teaching History, which I happen to do. It is also great for getting a deeper understanding in the broad sense of how something we take for granted is integral to how humanity developed. Yes, very geekish on the one hand, but on the other...cool information to annoy your friends with. Read SALT and consider its curious, circuitous route to your mouth.

I'm one of those strange people who like to know everything there is to know about one thing. I passed this book while running around my local library and thought to myself that I just didn't know enough about salt so I had to read it. Surprisingly, it was quite an entertaining read. For something we use so readily everyday, there is a mammoth history behind it. Wars were fought over it, it was used as currency, and it is used in various ways of food preparation from cooking to drying to pickling.

Like many other reviewers have stated, the text reads just like a history book rather than a novel. The book certainly serves its purpose though of informing the reader of every historical significance that salt has ever played, and then some.

Very interesting.

Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky is a great book that unloads a huge amount of major and minor facts about salt. It seems salt was a major ingredient to world history. And, frankly, I don't know why some of these facts were not talked about in MY history classes.

The Roman Empire, the Chinese Empire, the powers of the Mediterranean all needed salt. Salt was used as money, it was taxed and traded. It was used to cure skins, mine for silver and preserve meats. Without salt farmers would have died out, many early wars would rarely have happened and many navies would have no reason to have existed. Without salt fish could not have been turned into wealth, many explorers would not have even bothered to leave port and many a King would still be in power. Salt was a major item, a rock as important as gold, giving and taking away wealth and power.

Salt is quite an interesting read, especially for those interested in history. It covers the majority of the world, indigenous peoples, China, Europe, European colonies such as the US and Caribbean islands, as well as modern techniques. It also covers other industries that salt affects, such as salt fish, cod, and other preserves and pickles, as well as a brief touch on natural gas and hot sauce. Salt is an easy read, the author uses plain language throughout. It doesn't require any prerequisite other than very basic history you learned in school. I recommend it very much!

"Salt: A World History" is exactly what the title advertises: stories about the production, trade, and use of salt from our earliest archaeological and written records through to modern times.

Kurlansky's writing is serviceable at best and more often rather clunky,repetitious, and tin-eared -- no one will ever accuse him of being a great prose stylist or a master storyteller. He doesn't have the most developed historical sense, which means that bits of information float in discreet units, bereft of context or full interpretation. And he has a *thing* about the Basques, which I have noticed turning up in his other work as well -- I think he tends to insert information he knows well (such as Basque history) into historical moments he's less sure of, so as to sound more knowledgeable than he perhaps truly is.

Nevertheless, the stories Kurlansky has to tell are fascinating enough to mostly overcome those difficulties. As a bonus, each chapter can more or less stand on its own, so you can space your reading in bite-sized chunks, as it were -- "Salt" is a great book to bring to a waiting room or on a bus ride.

In summary, "Salt" is an interesting book, but with too many flaws for me to recommend buying it. Borrow a copy from the library instead.

I read this book just after another "A History of the World in Six Glasses". "Salt" is a fascinating look at the power of this spice over the centuries and the historical events that occurred due to salt or that were somehow related to the value of salt. I highly recommend this work if you are interested in an historical look from a different angle. Be aware though that the author jumps around a bit and loses the reader in details at other times. But you have to say, Mark Kurlansky has certainly done his research!

This book earned me the UberDork rating from anyone I told about it, but they are the ones who missed out. The writing is clear and makes for fun snippet reading. (Got 10 minutes? Pick it up!) The useless but fun facts mentioned by another reviewer are a big part of what kept me reading, but I have to admit that the real attraction was how Kurlansky connected salt to so many locations through the centuries. I disagree that SALT wasn't organized; it simply takes a "global" approach, something which many people can't appreciate because they perceive history as a linear concept. Linear history is neat and clean, but misses the point that events evolve, appear and disappear no matter where you drop in on the so-called "timeline". It is more a bubbling stew than a piece of string, in my estimation, and explains the "repetitiveness" mentioned in other reviews. SALT has the kind of circular information that comes in so handy for teaching History, which I happen to do. It is also great for getting a deeper understanding in the broad sense of how something we take for granted is integral to how humanity developed. Yes, very geekish on the one hand, but on the other...cool information to annoy your friends with. Read SALT and consider its curious, circuitous route to your mouth.

I'm one of those strange people who like to know everything there is to know about one thing. I passed this book while running around my local library and thought to myself that I just didn't know enough about salt so I had to read it. Surprisingly, it was quite an entertaining read. For something we use so readily everyday, there is a mammoth history behind it. Wars were fought over it, it was used as currency, and it is used in various ways of food preparation from cooking to drying to pickling.

Like many other reviewers have stated, the text reads just like a history book rather than a novel. The book certainly serves its purpose though of informing the reader of every historical significance that salt has ever played, and then some.

Very interesting.

Interesting would be the word I would use. Sure didn't know that there was so much going on with salt.

However, this book had flow issues. It seemed to wander around the globe with no flow. Chapters would jump from what subject matter to another. I think the author was attempting chronological order bit that didn't happen too well either.

Overall, interesting story about salt. Just needed some help with flow.

It starts off with a bit of ancient history starting with Rome and the process of salty garum (fish sauce)...it goes on and on and on. after I read chapter after chapter after chapter about this sauce and how it was a staple in the Roman diet I was bored to tears! I quit half way through the book. Maybe the author finally got to table salt towards the end but I wouldn't know because continuing reading was just too much of an effort.

Yes, Kurlansky is worth his salt as a writer, researcher and uncoverer of unknown facts about odd subjects. As he did with his previous non fiction books he has woven strands of information into an interesting tapestry, equal parts - enthralling history lesson and cultural voyage. The only problem is - at 450 pages and 26 chapters, with numerous visits to different cultures, countries, eras and rulers in an attempt to cover as many of the 14,000 uses that salt is known for - finishing SALT: A WORLD HISTORY leaves you in a brine of facts, but also very thirsty for a unifying theme or story and a more memorable read.
Certainly my knowledge of historical trivia is now seasoned with tidbits such as: the Anglo-Saxon word for saltworks being 'wich' means that places such as Norwich, Greenwich, etc, in England were once ancient salt mines; Ghandi's independence movement in India began with his defying the British salt laws, and the French levied taxes on salt until as recently as 1946.
A common theme in Kurlansky's books is that food is seen as a topic of historical interest. Here we learn about the role salt played in preserving cod, whale, ham, herring, caviar, pastrami, salami and sausage, and as it was with COD and THE BASQUE HISTORY OF THE WORLD this book is sprinkled throughout with recipes.
Salt is certainly an interesting subject; cultural history buffs will love this book and Kurlansky still has a humorous, easy, and very readable writing style; it's just that he probably could have salted away some of the facts without us missing much and he should have developed a flowing theme rather than one that was so saltatory.

I picked this book up while browsing a bookstore looking for something to read and I remember the author promoting the book on a radio program. The book goes into how salt was used by different cultures throughout history and describes how they utilized salt and its related products (brine, saltpeter, garum, etc.) to preserve all kinds of food. Apparently this was important to build trade exporting preserved goods that would otherwise spoil during transport over seas and rivers. The book is very thorough and even goes into detail by even describing what people did in the form of texts of old recipe books.
The writing style of the author was sometimes hard to follow sometimes and as you read from subchapter to subchapter its hard to figure out how he tied the segments together.
If you're a type of reader that likes food or are in the food industry it would be a pretty interesting book to read just to see how today's food evolved from generations before. This book is marginally good for history readers like me although the parts like how ambitious 18th century American fishing producers in New England came to be fed up with the sparse supplies of salt and subsequently leading to the American Revolution was a pretty interesting nuance upon the tapestry of my perception of the war was broadened. You'll get nice little tidbit here and there of good historical information of how wars broke out for salt of all things.
It's worth a read if you're not looking for anything in particular to read right now.

Take a good idea; add chemistry, etymology, economics, intellectual history, history of science, cooking, myths, and fables; fold in a ton of salt and mix with wit and humor. The result is a readable account of salt's significance through the ages. But every chapter uses the same recipe, and the same meal served twenty-six times in a row is difficult to finish. I finished, but couldn't read more than two chapters at a sitting. Still, the presentation is diverting and improving. You'll remember what you forgot and learn what you never knew.

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.

A real page turner, believe it or not. I couldn't put it down. Jam packed with information. If some of the facts are incorrect, and it didn't seem so to me who is wide read and has basic knowledge of most science, it is only to be expected. Who could possibly fact check a book with such encyclopedic scope.

My wife is reading it now and is similarly intrigued.

By the way, it's HISTORY, not a cook book. Don't read it if History bores you.

A mind-map connected with the word salt might be infinite. Mark Kurlansky has pursued a dozen branches. He provides a global and historical portrait of food, production and trade. The book is strongest in providing the cultural context of salt and its various uses in food. Salt is variously associated with wealth, status, virility, health and class. It is used as a flavoring, preservative, ingredient and catalyst. Olives, eggs, pickles, fish, ham, cheese, ketchup, tabasco and soy sauce are served. Salt's role with soldiers, sailors, taxes, politics and trade are covered. Technology, chemistry, pipes, pumps, evaporators, canals, shipping, mining, oil and geology are described.

This is a quirky journey which mostly enlightens and amuses. If you enjoy the variety and surprises of history, cultures, food and technology you'll enjoy digesting this 465 page main course.

Some members reviewing this book correctly understood the interconnection between the author's living with and researching the Basques, who were really among the first discovers of America where they fished and salt-dried the cod. From this came the thread that one of my favorite authors expanded and explored. Kurlansky does indeed write in a relatively straightforward style, narrating directly what he sees and learns - and ultimately shares with the reader.

Coming alone to this work without the linked background could well puzzle a new reader of his works - The Basques, Cod and Salt are really a Trilogy or Triptych of theme, if not fact.

I enjoyed the recipes in all the books and tried them out on my long-suffering wife. She did not enjoy the Salt-dried Cod caught and boxed by the Basque even when I dressed it with a favorite sauce, but I did, all three.

This is a whirlwind historial tour of one of civilizations most important products!

A sustance so valuable, salt has served as currency, influenced the establishment of trade routes and cities, provoked and financed wars, secured empires, and inspired revolutions.

The United States is both the largest producer of salt in the world and the largest consumer. It produceds more than 40 million metric tons, earning more than $1 billion in sales revenues.

Author Mark Kurlansky writes that fashionable people are divided into two camps. The first is passionate about staying healthy and eating less salt. The second is pasionate about salt.

Like all his books, Kurlansky's "Salt" is endlessly interesting and informative.

This comment refers to the audiobook by New Millennium. The book is interesting, but this version of the audio book is set up as 1 track of 60+ minutes per disk. As such, if you pause, stop or restart the disk you must re-listen from the beginning of the disk. The more typically audiobook formatting of 3-5minutes per track provides much greater flexibility. Avoid this version.

A fun history to read. If you are the kind of person who likes to spice up a conversation by explaining etymology or fun facts I would recommend "Salt." You could go to parties and say, "Say, you know that the word salad comes from the word salt," or, "Say, speaking of salary, did you know that word comes from the word salt." If you're looking for a concise history of how salt played into the greater history of civilization, you will have to look elsewhere.

A good summer read. A weak scholar's read (though the writing certainly is well researched).

Salt is a great subject for a book. Everyone is familiar with salt. It complements the flavor of food (as with French fries). It can be used to preserve foods (salted fish for example). It can be used to process foods (such as cheeses). It can be found in salt mines and in the evaporation of salt water. It is a commodity that can be bought and sold. It can be taxed by the government. And it can be exaggerated.

I'll give just one example. Midway through the book, the author states, "The history of the Americas is one of constant warfare over salt. Whoever controlled salt was in power." Think about that! The Declaration of Independence? -- Salt. The American Revolution? -- Salt. The Whiskey Rebellion? -- Salt. The War of 1812? -- Salt. The Mexican War? -- Salt. At least he did not say, "Give me liberty or give me salt!" Nonetheless, continued overreaching and exaggeration render the author's opinions unreliable and completely undercut the appearance of meticulous research. It is not long before the reader hears a voice in the back of his/her mind repeatedly saying, "I wonder if that is true?"

The book recites many interesting stories and presents novel perspectives of the role of salt in human society. However, as noted by many prior reviewers, the deficiencies of lack of organization, statements that are scientifically suspect and lack of historical reliability greatly detract from the potential of the subject matter. It is not a waste of time but there are better books out there.

"Salt," by Mark Kurlansky, is all you could possibly hope to know about "the only rock human's eat." Though well written, interesting, filled with lore, and entertaining, it's really more than I ever wanted to know. Maybe the secret of "Salt," like salt, is small doses. That's not the route I took, though. I figured I'd devour the text like any other book and finish it off in about a week. I almost did, and then something else beckoned (actually, anything could have beckoned and gained my interest after a week of "Salt,") and I put the book aside with about ten or fifteen pages to go. I haven't gone back to it.
One time I baked a whole chicken in a salt crust. It was an experiment and lots of fun. I mixed salt, flour, and water, to form a dough; flavored the chicken under its skin with tarragon, encased the chicken in the dough and baked it at 250 degrees. After about 45 minutes I took it out of the oven, and the crust had become so hard I had to break it with a hammer. The chicken was extremely pale, moist, and tender; but, man, was it salty! With the tarragon, strangely pleasant, but a little went a long, long way, and I've never gone back to that, either.

I've always been infatuated with food history and how it has influenced every part of our lives, but this is one stagnant read. By the umpteenth time the book delves back into English colonialism, I wasn't sure I could make it through. Granted, I assume information about that period in time is far more plentiful than earlier periods, but revisiting time, time, time, time and time again didn't make for a very interesting read. There were many Countries seeking to edge out others by controlling salt production. Be prepared to have that fact demonstrated to you many times across a couple hundred pages.

It has its moments, but overall disappointing.

So many things that I never knew about salt and trade - while I do love these single commodity/concept focused books, it does make me crave a bit more knowledge about how other things are woven into the "big picture."

Fascinating tidbits included stories about the salt mines in Eastern Europe which were carved into crystal palaces with slides for the rich to toboggan down (original roller coaster!) and spend time in the mines like a "park" with boat rides and sparkly splendor. Must've been quite something!

Salt is an intriguing book with personal adventures and comical thoughts of the effect that the mineral salt has made throughout the history of the world. Mark Kurlansky does a wonderful job at describing the copious amount of historical events impacted by salt,these have come from every part of the world. While reading Kurlansky takes you on a whimsical ride through time describing the economical advantages of salt and its importance thorughout culture by sharing the value of different dishes within their native habitats. The real line and hook were his own descriptions and happening of his trips to the different continents. These he connnected with his knowledge of slavery, Asain and Pacific Trading Routes, and various revolutions.
What truly makes this book is the love for food Kurlansky has and his unwavering opinion of food and its high impact on society. One of his other books called Cod, demonstrates the ravishing effects of fish. From both books there is an automatic connection between growing populations and the necessity of food.Since both people and food are inevitable the factor of them influencing each other is refreshing yet extremely obvious. Kurlansky shows tons of evidence and is very knowledgable on the subject and in return his ideas open up the expansion of food and its influence.

I read another book by this author ('Cod') years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it. So when I saw this book, I picked it up. But I didn't like this one nearly as well. It skipped back and forth through both history and place. I eventually finished it but I put it down/picked it up numerous times and found myself reading it in short doses.

Other reviewers have mentioned the errors, I can't speak about them because I simply don't remember my chemistry that well.

No it is not the SALT II talks.
It is a history of salt the seasoning.
This is a very well written book about the world's most common seasoning--and one man needs to live.
You will learn all about how salt was mined or gathered in different areas of the world and how salt was used as a preservative before refrigeration.
Kurlansky has a very interesting way of looking at history through food. The book is sprinkled (pun intended) with recipes. For the most part they are not ones you would want to try, but they give you a historical insight into cooking through the ages.
I am just sorry that the author has died so we cannot look forward to any more well written books by him.

This book is a relatively light look at how SALT has played a major roll in shaping our world and even the very language we use. The author has deeply researched the subject, compiling a very quick and fun read. While some of the historical ties might be overstated in parts, the roll of SALT really is undeniably important to both human survival and our culture.

One unexpected benefit of reading this book is that you can be the only "expert" on SALT around almost any table, a great way to fill those awkward long silences at company gatherings :-) I also recommend Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World for the same reasons.

Recommended!

The history of salt is a strange book indeed. Can one man really write a book about salt? Well, yes. It does drag on a bit too long for such a small subject. Like most people, I just wanted to satisfy my curiosity on why salt was/is important.

It did fulfill my three main goals - be interesting enough to finish, satisfy my curiosity, and tell me a little about history. However, it tends to delve into details that really aren't necessary. I guess the author wanted to capitalize on his former work on Cod, so he invests some time into it. It's a bit Euro-centric, but I will praise the book for devoting quite a few pages to India, China and Africa.

All in all, it's a good book. A worldly book that explains the importance and history, from ancient to modern times, of salt. It won't change your life nor will you quick speed through it with zest, but it is very readable and pretty interesting.

It does not flow as well as his less meandering effort Cod but it gives one a clear perspective of the flow of human history especially when salt stood alone as a scarce, precious, life sustaining compound. The clear picture of the mercantile giant, the Hanseatic League, lets one compare it to the globe straddeling corporations and industry groups of today. And it was fun. Learning the origin of ketchup and reading recipes for ancient cheese and ham, while gaining a good picture of the evolving world from ancient times forward, in one volume, is uncommon.

This is a gem of a book. It discusses and intertwines the history and importance of salt from prehistoric times until now in the context of the various types of salt, preserving and brining meat, fish and other foods, cooking, cheese making, health, geology, geography, place names, world trade, world history, warfare, art and investments, to name a few topics.
The descriptions of the role of salt in the American Civil War and the Caribbean islands were fascinating. Then there were the Romans, the Mayans, The Aztecs, the Chinese, the French, the Germans, the English, the Dutch, the Russians, the Scandinavians and others and their involvement with salt.
The recipes for cooking with salt are aptly chosen from about 4000 years of recorded history and are remarkably similar to those in use today. The colorful view and history of the San Francisco salt ponds from an airplane were always a bit of mystery to me, but no longer. The origin of towns and cities whose name ends in "wich" was enlightening, to say nothing of Salzburg and the many salt mines in the world.
In short, this book is a grand, well-written, informative and often amusing world panorama of salt filled with a host of pearls of learning. It is hard to put down and makes 449 pages pleasantly fly by, leaving you with a taste for more. If you have ever used salt, you really should read this book.

This is a comprehensive history of salt, and all the salty dealacies that we love including saurkraut, olives, fish, caviar and tabasco. It also goes throught the technology and politics of salt. It was a very fun read and a good book to remind us of salty foods that we have taken out of our regular diet. I have started having some of these foods as treats because book just wants to make you taste the flavors of salt and the flavors enhanced by salt.

This book focuses on the history of salt - but more than that, it focuses on history *because* of salt. Many things that I had no idea about were intimately related to salt! Besides the standard "Roman soldiers were paid in salt" stuff you've already heard - did you know that the discovery and production of natural gas initially started in China as a way to boil brine to produce crystalline salt? I did not.

The history of modern salt is slightly less interesting, but still worth a read. I've read this book three times through now, and am still learning from it.

This book does a wonderful job of showing the importance of salt to human history. Kurlansky demonstrates how some of history's most important events where influenced by salt, from the rise of empires to the fall of colonialism. Along the way you see how local culture was influenced throughout Europe and Asia by the availability of salt, creating the famous foods and odd delicacies that are so important to identity for many people. Definitely worth the read whatever you're interest is!

Salt is well written... it opens with a short personal experience which hooked me.... the book covers the historical development/discovery/usage of salt... there is description on the various types of salt and how it is derived.... the author takes you on a globe trotting experince throughtout history...

if you are interested in history or books on everything about "one" thing ..then salt will appeal to you... I love this book!!!!! read it!!!!!! even if you hate reading!!!!

Marc Kurlansky provides one of the best comprehensive social, economic and political reviews of a substance that at one time was as vital and fought over as oil is today. Salt: A World History gives spice to the global history of something that in modern times we take for granted. Mr. Kurlansky manages to show how Empires rose and fell over the substance with the book citing amazing examples from the Venetian salt merchants monopolistic manipulation of the salt market to the loss of the confederacy during the American civil war due to lack of adequate salt sources. Although one step away from an academic text, Mr. Kurlansky's writing style makes this book as accessible as a New York Times article.

Mr. Kurlansky manages to bring his strong interest in food to his work (he was a professional chef and food writer). Just don't expect a food network level presentation. This book is solid and far more erudite than your everyday celebrity chef commentary. But the absolute detail is what makes it better than your average read. Expect to learn about all the wonderful technology and political intrigue involved in salt production. For the foodie, there are also some interesting historical recipes scattered through the web of interesting facts and events. This book is not a casual read and fans of his other books such as Cod and The Big Oyster will find this book longer and perhaps a bit slower than his other titles.

If you have a love of food network's Elton Brown's accessible scientific explanations and Malcom Gladwell's ability to shift people's perceptions, then this is the perfect fusion of their two styles.

When I first saw this book, I thought "how could someone write an entire book on the history of salt?" I thought, "maybe it was a general history book that brought up how salt played a part". I was way off. The book is really about salt, every chapter, every paragraph, almost every sentence is about salt.

In some strange, amazing way, the book works. It took a few chapters to get used to the author's writing style (lots of talk of salt). By the third night of reading, I really got into it, and I could not believe how much I learned. While salt does not drive world events, it was interesting to see how much of history was impacted by something that is now so cheap and common.

The only down side was that I annoyed people over the next few weeks with endless stories about salt.

I come with a bias; I am a foodie, a saltoholic and a history fanatic. Any of these types of people would get excited over this book.

This is a long book to be sure but very well written. Enthralling and endlessly facinating. It took me ten days to get through it with limited time to read but I looked forward to it every day... to the point of excitment about what I might learn the next time I was able to sit down with the book. I hated that I finished it and considered re-reading it immediately. Minor quibble, I got tired of the chapter names but they are informative.

Oh, one other thing. I have always refused to buy specialty salts like fleur de sel. After reading this book, I felt confident enough in my salt knowledge to start trying out the WORLD of salt. Believe me there is a world... a universe!

An interesting volume, but skip the chapter, "The Odium of Sodium." The author, along with his editor and researcher deserve a good salting over the errors in this chapter. I'll list a few examples:
"...gunpowder which was potassium nitrate." Actually, gunpowder contains potassium nitrate, sulfur, and charcoal.
"Epsom salts is now used... ... in explosives." No way.
"...sodium carbonate in the form of baking soda." Sorry, it's sodium bicarbonate.
"...carbonyl chloride... Known as as mustard gas. Wrong again. It's known as phosgene.
And the errors continue. It makes me wonder how many errors exist in the other sections of the book.

Salt, A World History, is as enjoyable as the additive which we currently load our foods with. The point being, when tasted in moderation as opposed to excess, salt is great, and in the same way, Salt is great when read bit by bit. As intriguing as the factoids are that are thrown at the reader who picks up Mark Kurlansky's book, it lacks a captivating storyline or theme. I sometimes became lost in the point that Kurlansky was trying to make, as the order in which information is given lacks a firm pattern. I wished there was a solid hook to grab onto that would have taken me through the history of salt, as opposed to treating a chapter as a tedious task. Furthermore, Salt became slightly monotonous as some successive chapters were quite similar to one another.

When i first picked up this book, i wondered how over 400 pages could be written about that tasty tiny grain. However, Kurlansky came through in the detail in which he discoursed salt's history. The author causes me to now look at the fact that salt sits at my table in its shaker, with a respect. I respect that it is readily available to me although i'm middle class, as in classical times, the acquisition of salt distinguished social classes. In Greece, if one was a plebeian (of middle class) one would hold a negligible amount of salt in a shallow shell at his dinner table. If one was a patrician, (of high class) one would have excess amounts of salt in an imported ornate container. Now when i look into my cupboard and see Morton's cylindrical salt container "It Pours," I think of the lengths that Joy Morton went to to corner the industry on salt production and distribution in the United States. Morton monopolized the salt industry like governments before him. Kurlansky goes in full detail to explain that salt was one of the most significant commodities in earlier times, and it would make and break civilizations and towns and merchants and all other aspects of economics alike.

Having read this book, it seems to have armed me with expert knowledge on salt. I often find myself thinking "Salt link!" in school, when a topic comes up about preservation techniques in Egypt using the particular salt blend, natrum, or how rome's military movement was based on salt availability. Although the book is titled Salt, the book discusses a larger idea than just the history of salt. It is a prevailing theme throughout the book that in order to understand governments and societies throughout history, one must fully understand how salt fits into history's social, political, and economic facets. Although Salt is rather long, it is enriched and embedded with wonderfully descriptive pictures, maps, and diagrams, such as a building that has sunken into the earth from draining of brine from underground. Kurlansky did an excellent job at completing the task of fully explaining salt's role in the history of the world as humanity understands it.

I bought this book after it was recommended to me by a professor in a food-writing course. It sat on the shelf for more than a semester, as I had a full stack of books to get through for class. Then this summer a chef friend of mine finished it in about a day and started raving to me about it, so I figured it was time to crack it open.

It is one of the few books in the last year that I could not put down. I normally read several books at a time, skipping from one to another as my interest waxes and wanes. I finished this book in three days, and would have done so much faster if not for classes. Kurlansky's style is attention grabbing and well structured, and he kept me wondering where his narrative history of salt was headed next.

This book is an epicurean's history of the world, and as the title of my review states, I would recommend it to just about any fan of good food. It may not match up to the exhaustive standards of the work of strictly academic historians: but if it did, it would not be nearly as fun a read.

Kurlansky's research into Chinese salt practices was especially fascinating to me, and I have the feeling that with his skill he could devote an entire volume to that topic. I look forward to reading his book 'Cod', and anything else he writes.

It took me awhile to pick up this book. I had read about it, had seen it profiled in bookstores, and heard some water cooler talk about it. Too bad I waited so long. Kurlansky has a tremendous style which is more of a narrative - informative and interesting - nowhere near an academic lecture. Basically this is a world history through the lens of salt...and it works. Salt has influenced religion, trade, foreign policy, war, culture, diet and family. I will never look at a salt shaker the same way again.

The history of salt sounds less than amazing until you realize it shadows all human development and you learn why. Civilization depended on the ability to find, eat, process, secure and sell it. About 1/3 of the way through the book that is pretty fully explained and it is quite fascinatin and then the story moves on to the more mundane aspects of the industrial revoloution and salt used mroe and more in food etc etc.
Overall a good read and quite informative.

Oil, the need for it, the right to it and the posession of it, is the driving force in our world and the world economy today.

It used to be salt. As hard as it may be to beleive and to imagine, oil has now taken the place and position of need and importance that salt has had during most of human existence upon this earth.

Salt determined where the population centers were, where the migration of animals and humans movedt. Salt determined who was rich, who was poor, who survived and who did not. The "Haves" and "Have Nots" were defined by one thing: posession and access to salt. Salt was something for humans as well as nations to fight and to die for. Like oil of today.

A thoroughly fascinating read. There is much to be learned here...from the ancient world to the modern world, and it all comes down to salt. .

It is without a doubt the best non-fiction book I have ever read and I read all the time. The wars stared over salt, the sea journeys that salt made possible are just side issues here. I have read 3 of this authors books but as I said this is the best. I have bought several to give as gifts.

Kurlansky makes odd topics interesting and he does not fail with salt. Salt is truly one of the most important items in the history of the world. It has been essential in the development of civilization and has been fought over for centuries. The Middle East economy was built upon it and the fishing industries of Europe were essential. For those who are interested in how this vital commodity shaped the world this is a must read.

Great read very informative and opened another view about the way the world is the info on civil war salt mines was very good (why don't they teach us this in school ) read it extremely entertaining !!!

Salt is truly ubiquitous, which is why this book is so successful. We cannot live without the stuff, yet is there any other commodity that is more taken for granted? Only modern mining and transportation techniques allow us to overlook the important place that salt plays in our lives. But, as Mark Kurlansky shows us, it was not always so. From before the dawn of civilization to as recently as 100 years ago, the access to a stable supply of salt was of central concern to any community. Cities, cultures, and empires rose and fell due to their ability to secure it.

Coupled with the interesting historical facts is Kurlansky's accessable style, which makes this work of history read almost like a story. And in my opinion, that is the highest form of praise that a history can recieve. 5 stars!

This book is an extraordinary achievement. The author takes us through the evidence of virtually every know human culture, all of whom required the addition of salt in their diets. Where did these folks find salt? How did they convey it? The trade, taxation, varieties, mining, and innumerable uses of salt are all presented, from the earliest days days of prehistory to the present. Interspersed are numerous recipes from times and places we can only dream about. This book is spellbinding, endlessly fascinating, and overwhelmingly comprehensive.

I first read this book years ago when it first came out and it has poured through my memory every since. One of my most recommended books! A read that will take you on a journey through history, as well as a journey through the world with a single element. A truly fabulous, informative, and interesting story!

Kurlansky's book is interesting and easy-to-read (I think he has an excellent, very straight-forward, non-convoluted writing style). However, his book contains a lot of errors. For example: He has magnesium in light bulbs (it used to be in flash bulbs), and only nitrates in old-time gun powder (it also contained charcoal and usually sulphur). It's disconcerting to not know what else to believe. Also, I'm disapointed that none of the editorial reviews shown seem to address his errors.

I am incredibly impressed with the quality of research apparent in this book. However, Kurlansky makes no compelling historical argument(s). He simply reviews a record. Because of the importance of salt as a commodity throughout human history, I was excited to read this book, but I had to stop because there was nothing drawing me to continue reading. So much potential here, not a lot of attainment.

This book took an item we take for granted today, salt, and discussed its history. Some have criticized the author for including so many recipes. I disagree. Salt is used in cooking after all, and to put salt into a proper context we need to witness how it was used.

I enjoyed how the author wove the various aspects of the salt trade into a coherent history. For instance, that salt was so important in wartime never struck me before, though it seems obvious now.

A good, hard to put down read, Salt: A World History is a good book for people who like history, economics or the culinary arts.

Mark Kurlansky's super-spare language occasionally strips passion from his methodical study, at times rendering a colorful journey into a death march of facts. Thank goodness he loosens up after the first six chapters, leaving behind blow-by-blow accounts of cheese-making in Parma ("The difference between fresh cheese and aged cheese is salt") for richer territory. A chapter entitled "The Hapsburg Pickle" takes us deep into the salt mines of central Europe, where Polish miners transformed the caves of Wieliczka into rock salt chapels and the owners brought guests into salt ballrooms via underwater lagoons. Later chapters take us into the New World, to the banks of the Dead Sea, and alongside the derricks of Zigong--fascinating journeys that reveal surprising connections among commerce, cuisine, and control.

A great read, once you make it past the first hundred pages.

Mr. Kurlansky had a great idea to wrap a world history around the discovery, usage and evolution of salt. There are many fascinating tales around this substance, but unfortunately you can't get away from the fact that you can only read the word "salt" so many times in one sentence or paragraph before you begin to yawn.
This, I think, leads to a certain desparation by the writer in attempting to find something - anything - to amuse the reader. One great example is a sentence containing the word "tintinabulation" which, if looked at carefully, is totally meaningless and serves only for the author to exercise his ego in being able to say that he used the word in a published sentence.
Another problem is the easy way that Mr. Kurlansky throws untruths into his story to back up some odd facts .. for example, he says that French is a language that "does not use apostrophes" during a store-naming story. Considering that the apostrophe is liberally used in French (c'est la vie!) these kinds of assertions cast doubt on the rest of the "facts" presented.
I felt the book was a way for Mr. Kurlansky to attempt to impress us with his perceived worldliness and culinary expertise - to the extent that the book wraps up with a recipe for butter cookies.
Sorry, don't bother, ego gets in the way of what may have been a good story.

There is so much history to salt, how it is needed by humans and how it has altered human history. Unfortunately, this book does not take advantage of this rich background. Instead it simply reprints long tracts of old letters or ancient food recipes without explaining the context or moving the reader. A good history strings a story together and illuminates the reader, I am disappointed that 'Salt' fails to do this.

Kurlansky's effort here is informative but not as engaging as his earlier effort in the history of COD. Having finished this book I am still not sure whether it was written for those of us generally interested in arcane history or just a romp through history for "foodies".

Reading this was not a complete waste of time but SALT is not the author's best writing.

I thoroughly enjoyed listening to this book. Brick is a wonderful reader and I was engaged the entire time. I stopped reading the book because the recipes got me down, but they sound like the stories they're meant to be when Brick reads them. My complaint is that the dynamic range is very wide. Which is to say, Brick's voice goes from quiet to loud very suddenly. This makes the reading much more interesting, but it also makes it annoying, because it's hard to settle on a good volume in the car . . . A quibble, perhaps, but it got to me. That written, I did enjoy listening overall.

While this book contains interesting tidbits, the reader has to work quite hard to uncover them. There was no evidence of a theme, or any attempt to create a flow of ideas. The book was more of an amalgamation of random salt stories, most not even strung together in a coherent way. I thought the introduction was the only section that was going to jump around from topic to topic but it is shockingly the entire book! Much of the text was repetitive, awkwardly worded, or just fluff that should have been edited out. I was sadly disappointed as a passionate and eager person on the subject of salt. This book should have been a longer article or cut down by half the size to make it worthwhile to the reader - what happened to the editing??! Beware - it is a tough read that likely will not keep your attention past the first couple chapters. A much better book could have been written on such a fascinating topic. I do not recommend purchasing.

If someone had told me a book on salt would keep me fascinated to Sacramento and back I would have told him or her that s/he was nuts. The author did a wonderful job tracing the seasoning through history and making the people, times, and places come alive. While the more modern period did not capture my imagination in the way the earlier sections did, overall this was a wonderful read.

Kurlansky's text is fragmentary and spotty, jumping from notion to notion without deeply examining any of them. For example, he has a chapter purporting to be about the geology of salt, but it actually covers petroleum and preservation; the bits on geology are scattered everywhere else.

Worse is the regular occurance of factual errors, half-truths, and pure mistakes, appearing on nearly every page of the book. If an author wants to write about a chemical compound, he ought at least to know a little chemistry. Kurlansky claims that no one knows why the sea is salty; suggests that water can be 'cooked' out of salt; does not understand hygroscopy; cannot reliably identify which ions are reponsible for basic and which for acidic properties; and may not know what a redox reaction is.

The 'salt' article on Wikipedia is better.

Salt is well written... it opens with a short personal experience which hooked me.... the book covers the historical development/discovery/usage of salt... there is description on the various types of salt and how it is derived.... the author takes you on a globe trotting experince throughtout history...

if you are interested in history or books on everything about "one" thing ..then salt will appeal to you... I love this book!!!!! read it!!!!!! even if you hate reading!!!!

When you go from explaining the words "soldier" and "salami" have salt as their origin and why, right up to Tabasco Sauce and the McIlhenney Company of New Iberia, Louisiana and finally up to Morton Salt, well its how a 14 CD book can keep you fascinated. Excellent. I came in with few preconceived ideas but little more than a minor curiosity. This was a real treat.

I was browsing the new releases section of my local library when I happened to see this book. It had an interesting premise, and looked to be unlike any book I'd read before. I've read histories of people and places, but never of ingredients. I checked it out skeptically, and was pleasantly surprised.
Kurlansky is a very talented writer, he manages to make salt suspenseful. The book's purpose is to examine how salt affected the history of the world. He succeeds in this. However, the history is not really coherent, it doesn't really flow. Salt is essentially a collection of vignettes. These vignettes are grouped in chronological order. The first part of the book deals with salt in China and Rome. Part 2 concerns salt's effect in the Middle Ages and the wars of independence. Part 3 concludes the history by examining salt in modern times.
The main failing of this extensively researched account is Kurlansky attempts to link salt to every major world event. According to him, dissatisfaction with the salt tax led to the American and French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution came to be because of salt, and salted foods allowed the world to be explored. Nonetheless, the history is accessible and a fun to read, even if some of the author's conclusions are a bit off base.

I wish I had been taught world history through a device such as this. Instead of learning the names of kings and battles and related dates, this kind of perspective really helps the reader understand the 'why' of so much behind what ultimately happened in western civilization. Once you can grasp that conceptual overview, all else follows with profound logic.

I was looking forward to reading this book, but simply could NOT get into it. There's nothing that pushes the story along. You read for a few pages about something that maybe, as a stretch, has something to do with salt, and then they'll be some 300 year old recipe. A lot of the poorly connected stories seemed to me to have nothing to do with salt at all, and I really felt like the author was reaching to draw a connection. If it had been edited down to 150 pages or so, not the slow going 450 pages it is, it would have been more bearable.
I cannot recommend this book.

I read very little non-fiction, but this book was so full of interesting facts that it was almost impossible to put down. Kurlansky's account of mankind's quest for salt and the commerce it created is indeed a mini-history of civilization. The book is well written, easy to read, and holds the reader's interest from first page to last. I found myself reaching for it again and again to find out what happens next. Who would have dreamed that a common every-day product that we take for granted could have such a rich, varied history? Kurlansky did a wonderful job!

Where oh where was the editor when Mr. Kurlansky submitted his book. Salt has a long history but did Mr. Kurlansky think he needed to take us through every century with every bit of the minutiae of Salt's history? After awhile I began to edit the chapters as I read and I saw how easily Mr. Kurlansky's book could have become the readable and not the painful book it was...It seemed that every fact whether concerned with Salt, sugar or cinnamon made it's way into this book. At the end he was even compelled to tell us when the miner's safety hat was
invented...STOP please stop...this book can contribute to high blood pressure for the reader.....

Read Kurlansky's Cod first, it serves as a preamble to this book and this book is a great joy to read. It is easily my favorite book I read last year. Well written, well researched, wonderful tale of salt and what it did to shape our history. If you're reading this review just buy the book, you will be very happy you did.

i bought this because i really like reading different takes on world history ("a history of the world in 6 glasses" by tom standage, for example). the best way to describe this book is to compare it to my 'history of the south' professor from college. he took a what has the potential to be a fascinating subject and made it b-o-r-i-n-g. despite the fact that it was poorly written--i'm sorry but a published author should be able to find more interesting prepositional introductions than "in fact"--it jumps from place to place. i think it was supposed to be following a rough timeline, but it didn't do it very well. and, there are far too many recipes. are we actually supposed to try them? like the ones for preserving human bodies?