"Salt: A Comprehensive Exploration of its History, Use, and Significance Throughout the World" by Mark Kurlansky

salvatore c. mazzara: If you know the history of salt you a lot of history.

United States on Sep 07, 2023

MH: I love this book so much that I buy it as gifts. Not fluff… you will learn a lot with every chapter.

United States on Aug 26, 2023

April McLoughlinApril McLoughlin: I borrowed the audio cd’s from the library back in 2008 and listened on a long drive I had to make. The book contained so many interesting facts about salt that I hadn’t realised its importance throughout history. I bought the audiobook last year and became curious about the old recipes for preserving food included that I wanted to write them down. I never got around to them, so I decided to buy the book when I saw a secondhand hardback copy for less than a tenner. I was pleased surprised to see maps, drawings, and photographs of various places and tools used in salt production mentioned in the book. I bought the book to have a written copy of the recipes or cooking methods, but it’s become an interesting conversation piece sitting on my sitting room table.

United Kingdom on Apr 24, 2023

Canady: Spannend von der ersten bis zur letzten Seite!

Germany on Apr 22, 2023

Nigel: Loved the book. Mark's obsession with Salt and interweaving with the threads of history and society is fascinating and inspired. I learnt, I questioned and I grew through the pages. Anyone curious about history, anthropology, cooking and NaCl should read this book 😉

United Kingdom on Feb 19, 2023

AGNOLETTI VANNI: Impegnativo e scritto bene. A mio avviso incompleto in alcune parti. Assolutamente da avere e leggere

Italy on Jul 11, 2022

David: Learned a lot of cool things about the thing that's on my table, and most other tables I've sat at!

I read some other reviews that say there are too many recipes. Nah, hardly. You /could/ try to make a recipe of this book, but they don't go into a lot of detail with measurements and stuff. The recipes that are dotted here and there in the book are really focused on the interesting details in there...

*spoilers* Like that Roman empire one, with the recipe on how to cook a flamingo - lol! What!

*one last spoiler* Did you know that the saying "when it rains, it pours" came from a salt advertisement in the early 20th century? Weird, right?

*Actually, if you read those spoilers above before you read the book, nbd. There's a whole book filled with this stuff!*

On the other hand, I would've liked it if 'salt' had been defined earlier on in the book (apparently we're not just talking about table salt here - and salt-peter is a different thing), and it'd be better if the facts were produced more chronologically... But the author usually seemed to organize his information by spending some time in one area of the world before moving on to another. So that's...

Canada on Nov 19, 2018

Amazon Customer: I am a qualified Nutritionist and Naturopath and I appreciate reading books that are rich in meaningful information. I bought this book because I had increasingly noted that the concerns we have about table salt are unfounded. So I decided to do some research. To get a good handle on salt, I needed to go back in time (hence this book) to understand the use of salt throughout history, and then relate that to more recent studies that were conducted.

There were as many studies claiming salts benefits and there are many claiming salt is bad. So that did not give me any confidence that everyone was singing from the same hymn sheet. Whenever I see conflicting study outcomes, I immediately look to see whether we are comparing apples with apples, and we were not. You see, there are actually 3 types of salt and one is very good and two are not so good. Most studies did not even point this out, or realised that we humans eat three very different types of salt. So let me try to make sense of this:

I have certainly come to the conclusion that many others have already come to, that the benefits of eating generous amounts of the right salt to suit one’s taste is justified, and...

United States on May 19, 2013

Keith Smith: 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...

United States on Dec 07, 2003