Tom Standage

I have a hard time reading pure history. History told in the framework of a theme that I'm excited about (food, sex) is more likely to grab my attention and stick with me when I'm done, which is why I picked up this book. Human history through food? Awesome! This gave me visions of something akin to Michael Pollen's The Botany of Desire with a broader focus. Perhaps my expectations were too high, but I was fairly disappointed in this book. There was very little discussion of the culture show more around food (which is probably the most interesting aspect for me) and even the focus on the functionality of food through history seemed to be as little about food as possible.

All in all, this was a very readable book, just not what I was looking for. It was also a very typical Euro- and US-centric telling of history; continents other than Europe and North America barely exist in this narrative. Not surprising, but still disappointing. show less

A refreshing and thought-provoking look at "social media" in its current and historical forms. Standage defines a social media system as "an environment in which information was passed from one person to another along social connections, to create a distributed discussion or community." This allows him to bring into the discussion such examples as Cicero's network of correspondents, Tudor courtiers sharing commonplace books of poems, and the coffeehouse culture of Enlightenment Europe. He's show more chosen his examples quite well, and drawn from the right sources to make his arguments stick.

After providing a few case studies of historical social media environments, Standage offers some chapters on the mass media culture which sprang up around the 1830s with newspapers and continued through the rise of radio and television (though, as he points out, at the beginning of the radio world there was a time when that too functioned basically as a social media system). Now, he maintains, the tide has turned again, with the Internet and all its tools offering an opportunity for social interaction on a grand scale never before known. The main point is that while today's methods and scale and media may be new, the ideas behind them--"social platforms that enable ideas to travel from one person to another, rippling through networks of people connected by social bonds, rather than having to squeeze through the privileged bottleneck of broadcast media"--have been with us for a very long time indeed.

Witty and amusing, as Standage's writing tends to be (and thus, quite fun to read). show less

I'll start by admitting that I gave up on this piece of trash half way through the audiobook. After 5 hours of horrid narration I did not hear a single fact that was news to me, nor even an interesting interpretation of known facts.

The writing is disjointed, and meaningless extra words and phrases are thrown in so that the whole thing comes across as a first year history student's lazy attempt to meet the word count requirements for his assignment. The author also editorializes in random, show more bizarre ways. For example while discussing the spice trade, he suddenly goes on a tangential rant about his disagreement about the "eat local" movement. He justifies his position against eating locally by talking about the western tradition of colonizing and trading with far off countries. However he has no observations or opinions, or even mention, of the genocide and slavery that accompanied these activities.

The author sounds like a throwback from the 1940's, speaking in favour of colonialism, monoculture, heavy food exportation and even saying that it is in the best interests of developing countries to dedicate their land to the export of cash crops.

And the narration is even worse than the writing. The writer has tried to stretch out the book with a lot of excerpts from historical documents and the narrator does voices for these excerpts that are at best silly and annoying but often just sound racist. If the excerpt was written from a western historian, the narrator does a voice that sounds like Johnny Carson's swami character. But for the many excerpts from non-western sources, the narrator does accents such as "slow indian" that are unbelievably offensive. show less

Interesting take on how the development, use, and trade in beer, wine, distilled spirits, coffee, tea, and cola drinks have impacted human history.

Standage casts a wide net here, looking at issues as disparate as health effects on drinkers and international trade policies, social status and the industrial revolution, and medical practice and Madison Avenue. Along the way, he serves up tasty aperitifs about an 870 BCE royal feast that lasted 10 days and provided wine to its 69,000 show more participants; one possible reason for Islam's prohibition of wine; and how to define "boiling" when referring to water for tea.

The final section of the book, which deals specifically with Coca-Cola, is probably the weakest part. While the background history of the development of the drink is fascinating, he doesn't even nod at how the sugar demands for soft drinks have impacted both international politics and public health. He instead takes a look at the Coke/Pepsi competition as Cold War weaponry -- an unexpected turn indeed.

When you finish this book, you may not only want to offer a toast to Standage, but you will also understand just what that gesture means. Salút! show less