Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Kurlansky uses salt as a thread to link cultures and history
Salt" takes the reader through thousands of years of human cultural and scientific development, all-the-while making it interesting and accessible. The common character throughout is ordinary table salt, which up until 100 years ago, played a far more important role in human society and economics. Through the use of this everyday material, Kurlansky takes us on a tour that from ancient China and Rome, to Britain's rule of India, into the slave operated salt mines of Europe, down to Avery Island during the American Civil War (and the creation of Tabasco Sauce); all with a focus on the cuisines of those places and times. A long book that I was sorry to finish.
Rating: - We liked it
My husband and I and a visiting sister both found the book fascinating. What I like is that again I realized all the layers there are in history. There is no one reason things sort of happen. It happens in our own lives on a much smaller scale. We look back and wonder why we did things not remembering at the time all the circumstances that caused us to make the choice we did. This just happens more so in history and it is good to be reminded of some of the links and reasons.
Rating:  - The history of civilization taken with a grain of salt
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.
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