Salt: A World History

In this non-fiction microhistory I expected to find a lot of really fascinating stuff about this amazing mineral without which humans (and many other animals) cant survive and which has shaped trading and cultures. Also, I expected to be fascinated, informed and intrigued as I have always wanted to read microhistories about coffee and salt.

I am really. really sad to have failed to enjoy this book.

A lot of that information is there, as expected but it it failed to fascinate and intrigue. It also informed less often than I had been hoping. There was virtually no science of any kind, it was about trade and human history, which is ok, but it was not well done. The writing felt like it was lists a lot of the time, it repeated itself SO much of the time that one became bored by the information, even though the information itself could have been interesting. For example: So many cultures used salt pans and because of the physical chemistry nature of salt they were all very similar, I get it. But instead of detailing exactly what every single culture did - when they are nearly identical - maybe having described the first one you did not need to write exactly the same minutae of detail for EVERY subsequent culture that did the same thing? I think even the narrator must have been bored; he is a very experienced narrator/actor, as I understand it, but the long lists of salt pans and cultures was often read in an unvarying drone. It might be better read than listened to, as one would be able to skim over repetition and recipes.

A problem I had with it personally, is that I have read another book by this author Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World which I thoroughly enjoyed, and a large part of Salt: A World History seems to have the exact same stuff in it, down to the recipes. Those recipes which I mostly skim read over the first time, but had to listen to in agonising detail here, as it was narrated in a drone.

As we progressed through this book, I was so bored that I was spending more time analysing my responses to the book than what was being said. Here is the conclusion I reached; the author is a great researcher, GREAT! He is especially interested in history and trade but not so much in science and the natural world. Not at all, in fact. Over many years of research and note taking, he noticed how often salt cropped up in both history and trade. At some point, he or his publishers decided it was a shame not to use a lot of that research even if most of it HAD been used in other books.
So he wrote Salt, a book that could have been a dream of a book, but is instead tedious as it repeated large sections from pervious books. It reads more like a pile of notes assembled by a Phd student who keeps changing his major and can't put his notes in order properly or assemble them into a cognitive narrative for his thesis. I would send this thesis draft back for further editing, which is what the publishers should have done with Salt: A World History.

This was a Did Not Finish for me at the end of chapter 14. I realised my library loan had expired and my main feeling was relief, I had no urge to renew or re-borrow and I am seriously doubting whether I want to read anything more by this author.

Previously read Sept 2003 - Checked this out from the library on the recommendation of Carla Irene

The title is pretty self-explanatory: the book discusses how salt was accessed, processed, sold and used from ancient times through today. I was pleased to see non-European cultures were included - especially since China and India have had such a rich history entwined with this essential mineral. However, I would have liked to see more info about North & South America and sub-Saharan Africa, and I don't remember anything about Australia at all.

The book itself is very readable - covering both some more technical aspects of collecting and refining salt, as well as giving recipes and discussing the economic aspects. While I'm sure most people know that the word "salary" comes from the Latin for salt, I didn't realize that in pre-industrial times, if a nation started buying huge amounts of salt, that was a possible indication that they were going to war, as all the rations for the soldiers would need to be preserved. I learned quite a bit about Italian and Chinese history & culture that I didn't know before - and I never realized that salt was one of the main reasons for India's revolt against England.

I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in an overview of history (with a twist) and plan to read more books by Mr. Kurlansky.

I felt so proud to be reading/listening to this. “Look at me getting all educated about salt, of all things! Most people don’t even KNOW about salt’s historical importance.”

The first few chapters, sure…hmm, interesting, I didn’t know that! That’ll make a nice dinner party/trivia share.

And then it kept going, in no particular order or structure that I could determine, for TWENTY-SIX (not short) chapters. Even when I spent one of my Audible credits to get the audiobook, thinking that maybe listening and having something else to look at would make it tolerable, my boyfriend and I could only listen to it an hour at a time on our roadtrip because we’d both start to fall asleep. “On {date} {historical figure/civilization/ruling body/etc.} {discovered a place with/figured out a way to make/traded with/lost control of} salt. Over and over and over and… (you get the picture) for 26 chapters. In no fathomable order.

I don’t fault the author. He did an incredible amount of research…good on him. I bumped it up from 1 star to 2 stars for that reason alone.

Where was the f**king editor? This could actually have been a decent read. Shorten it. Organize it. Footnote the dates. SOMEthing…

AIYIYI... I just couldn't take this book. I was determined to read it after I chose it for a challenge I had entered but my goodness was it a struggle. I don't know if it was because I had just finished a textbook size of a book that was purely about science (A Short History of Nearly Everything) and was in major fiction withdrawal, or the fact that this book was breathtakingly boring, but I could literally not read more than 15 pages before I actually started to drift off into a deep slumber. I had to think about and plan out times where I would be awake enough to read. I had to get multiple nights of decent amounts of sleep before I could continue on my huge undertaking of reading more than 20 pages.

It was as if Kurlansky was intentionally aiming for the reader to not give a rats a** about salt. For the reader to actually not want to learn anything further about something that kinda seemed interesting at the time. The information Kurlansky gave me was so irrelevant and uninteresting I found myself having to reread lines over and over and still not be able to understand what the significance of it being there was.

I was really excited to read Salt: A World History because I thought it would be an unique experience to read about a topic that most people take for granted. To learn some new and interesting things about a topic that is very rarely a point of conversation. But what I found was what I thought the stereotype of books about random specific topics would be like. Completely and totally uninteresting and boring. Just because a book is non-fiction and about salt doesn't mean the writing as to be blander than an instruction manual on how to put together a flash light.

No, this is certainly not a World History of Salt. Oh yes, I concede: there's a lot of salt in it. Kurlansky has stuffed a stunning amount of knowledge about this commodity in this book. But he has forgotten to tell a narrative, to look for the bigger picture, to analyse basic economic or cultural trends. And on top of that he has left his critical gaze at home. In the end all he offers is this mumbo jumbo of facts, titbits of knowledge, myths and nice stories, all about salt. I hope one day someone will do a better job.

the author read everything there is to read about salt. then he relentlessly put every bit of it in this book. you will wish for the end waay before you get there, i promise.

4.5 stars rounded down

Exactly my kind of book. I love a good deep dive.

Didn’t hold my interest as much as we got into more modern times, and there were several sections where it felt a bit surface.

My second Kurlansky and surely not my last!

Update, May 2021 Where I live has the most exclusive and best-tasting salt in the world. All over the Caribbean are salt ponds fringed with mangroves. Once every ten years or so there will be a major storm which will fill the ponds with water, and then there will be a drought of at least four months, which will evaporate it completely leaving huge salt crystals, untainted by any pollution at all, since there is no industry for thousands of miles. This salt is the saltiest salt you've ever tasted, and one pond is distinguishable from the next. These crystals are a little whiter, a little yellower, bigger, or smaller, you can taste the difference, and they are no more like table salt than French champagne is to Prosecco.

2019 was the last year for this. Hurricane Irma had filled the ponds in September 2017, then an early drought in 2019 meant the ponds were drying out. My son used to go and find conchs who would die and take them out to the sea, to deeper water. He collected about 7lb of salt, enough for presents and until the ponds dry out again.
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I read several chapters of this. It was mind-numbingly boring. Lists, lists, lists of everything that has ever been done with salt. What different countries, cultures and times have done with salt. The word salt in many different languages. That old thing about salary being the precious salt that the Romans paid their military in, right. I was praying for a relief from the tedium of this book. But all I got was the odd not-at-all interesting anecdote. I don't know how the rest of the book progressed but I don't care either.

This was about as interesting as reading the long list of all the ingredients in a box of Twinkies where you can't pronounce half of them, have never heard of the rest and are only reading it because there isn't anything else to read. (Like you do cereal boxes or the ketchup bottle). That said, the book Twinkie, Deconstructed: My Journey to Discover How the Ingredients Found in Processed Foods Are Grown, Mined (Yes, Mined), and Manipulated Into What America Eats was actually very interesting. If Steve Ettlinger could make that interesting, I don't see why Kurlansky failed so utterly with Salt.

But he did, at least for me. A lot of Kurlansky's other books sound very appealing, but I'm wary now...