Salt: A World History

Writing a world history organized by the way everything connects back to salt was a surprisingly brilliant idea. Because salt was a strategic concern in the organization of many countries and their wars, it’s possible to touch on many of the most interesting periods in history by talking about salt. This could very easily have led to a disorganized book, but each chapter focused on a specific country and the book generally moves forward in time. Together, that was enough to give the book a cohesive feel.

The real strength of this book was the combination of a broad historical overview of the role salt played in shaping society with some extremely interesting anecdotes. It made for an entertaining and educational read. It also helped that the author has a very engaging tone. The biggest weakness of this book was the author’s fondness for discussing the cod trade and for sharing exact recipes in the original old English. Despite the author’s best attempts to be interesting, these sections were inevitably dry and/or hard to follow.

Overall, I enjoyed the book and learned so many fun facts I had a hard time choosing one to share at the beginning of the review. It is occasionally dry, but the recipes are easily skimmable and the majority of the book is well worth a read.

This review first published on Doing Dewey. ( )

The history of salt is a history of humanity in crystal form, in a lot of ways. Some of it's horrifying, some of it's funny, and much of it is just silly (grey salt used to be shunned because it wasn't pure, and now it's fashionable and more expensive than white!). Exhaustively researched and unfailingly interesting. The narrator's voice was more than a little hypnotic, so it took me many, many nights to hear the whole thing. ( )

I really enjoyed this book : Kurlansky's tongue-in-cheek humor was very welcome in a work that could have been ridiculously dry. If it's done well, as this one is, reading about history from the perspective of a single item can be fascinating. Probably it's more accurate to consider this book as tracking salt's progress and connotations through changing historical contexts.

It also happens to be a good commute-type read, if you're into that kind of thing - good for picking up & reading in bits and pieces. The only thing is that it gets a little beat up in your bag. Sorry, Gershon. ( )

I imagine Kurlansky did an insane amount of research for this book but unfortunately, I found it very dry and very boring. My strategy as I got deeper into the book was to stop reading the recipes because they were pretty much all the same. The latter 1/4 of the book was more interesting but not enough to make the book a worthwhile read. If you want to read about every single saltwork that has ever existed, this is the book for you. But I wouldn't so much call this a history of salt as I would a history of every time someone used salt to cure fish (which is a lot of times). ( )

Summary: Salt is so ubiquitous nowadays that it's sometimes hard to remember that for much of human history, it's been relatively difficult to come by. It's something that all humans (all animals, for that matter) need to survive, but at times it has been rare enough to be used as currency. Wars have been fought over it, and wars have been won or lost because of it. In this book, Mark Kurlansky takes us through the history of salt, starting with the Egyptians, and the earliest Chinese salt mines, and moving through history and around the globe, looking at how we make salt, and how we use it, right up to the modern-day familiar metal pour-spout canisters that we all have in sitting our cupboards.

Review: In 2005-2006, when I was finally figuring out that maybe non-fiction wasn't so bad after all (embarrassingly late in my reading life, I know), it seemed like this book was everywhere. Especially once I'd read Victoria Finlay's Colors, I decided that microhistories were the non-fiction of choice as far as I was concerned, and Salt was the book that most people used as the primary example of the genre. I can't say why I waited so long to read it, and I can't decide whether or not it's a good thing that I did. Because I have read a number of microhistories that attempt a similar task as Salt (on different subjects, of course), and accomplish that task much more successfully. So maybe it would have been better had I read it as a non-jaded non-fiction neophyte... or maybe it would have put me back off the genre.

All that sounds really negative, when I don't mean it to. Salt had a lot of interesting parts. It was obviously exhaustively researched, and was jam-packed full of awesome trivia. (Two of my favorites: the phrase "to be worth one's salt" and the word "salary" came from the fact that Roman soldiers were occasionally paid their wages in salt. Also, Avery Island, where Tabasco sauce originated, was and is a functioning salt mine that produces most of the salt used in the sauce.) (Okay, three of my favorites: 51% of US salt production is used for de-icing roads, vs. only 8% for food.) This book inspired me to think about something that I typically take for granted, which is definitely something I look for in my non-fiction. Kurlansky's prose is smooth, and he's good about working in quotes from period sources while still keeping things easy to read.

My main problem with this book was that it got repetitive in places. There are only so many different ways of producing salt (mining, several types of evaporating, etc.), but as Kurlansky looks at salt production around the world, he describes each country's preferred method in detail, even if it's not that much different from the previous section. Similarly, the process of making salt cod is not all that different from the process of making salted herring, but each fish gets its own chapter. On the one hand, I appreciate his thoroughness, but I did think things could have been condensed down without sacrificing some of the accuracy. In its place, I think he could have covered a slightly broader range of topics, moving away from straight-up history and venturing a little deeper into the biology and chemistry of salt. He touches on these topics, of course, but sometimes only glancingly. (Plus, of course I always think the biology angle could be expanded upon.) 3.5 out of 5 stars.

Recommendation: This book definitely has a lot of interesting parts, so I don't mean to scare anyone off it entirely. I think it's worth reading for people who like microhistories in general or the history of food in particular (or whose doctors have put them on a low-sodium diet and want a historical perspective!). Just be prepared to skim when you get to the fourth or fifth recipe for salt fish. ( )