Rating: 
Summary: Not Worth Its Salt
Review: I gave up on it after reading for a while, and then skimming. I was a bit put off when I read that salt is the only rock we eat. Not true: we eat clay in candy, muscovite in candy, ground up quartzite in various products, and so on. The book seems better suited to those interested in cooking. The science, on the other hand, was too elementary for me. The importance of Salt in political history sounded overrated to me.
Rating: 
Summary: Great Historical Presentation
Review: I have come to believe that you DO learn something with every new book. In this case, it is the extreme importance of salt as an empire-creating, nation-building, source of survival and yes, luxury. It is hard to imagine a world without salt. Indeed, the reason salt is rarely discussed in history books today is due to its ubiquity. If gold were as common as salt, it too would become a subject of relative unimportance.Essentially, this is a presentation of salt from several angles, mostly historical. There is some science and health for the interested layman, some helpful illustrations and charts. Also the several old recipes are interesting in what they say and what they omit. It is the history that I found fascinating, the rise and fall of companies and empires based on this single commodity. A good, easy read.
Rating: 
Summary: A book that's kind of all over the place, so to speak.
Review: I picked this book up while browsing a bookstore looking for something to read and I remember the author promoting the book on a radio program. The book goes into how salt was used by different cultures throughout history and describes how they utilized salt and its related products (brine, saltpeter, garum, etc.) to preserve all kinds of food. Apparently this was important to build trade exporting preserved goods that would otherwise spoil during transport over seas and rivers. The book is very thorough and even goes into detail by even describing what people did in the form of texts of old recipe books. The writing style of the author was sometimes hard to follow sometimes and as you read from subchapter to subchapter its hard to figure out how he tied the segments together. If you're a type of reader that likes food or are in the food industry it would be a pretty interesting book to read just to see how today's food evolved from generations before. This book is marginally good for history readers like me although the parts like how ambitious 18th century American fishing producers in New England came to be fed up with the sparse supplies of salt and subsequently leading to the American Revolution was a pretty interesting nuance upon the tapestry of my perception of the war was broadened. You'll get nice little tidbit here and there of good historical information of how wars broke out for salt of all things. It's worth a read if you're not looking for anything in particular to read right now.
Rating:
Summary: Better than Cod book
Review: I read Cod book by the same author and nearly starved to death. At least salt book wasn't as drenched with recipes, and showed numerous interesting facts on a pretty broad subject of salt. Although not all history about salt was covered, I think the author did a pretty good job for a pleasure reading book. However, I must admit that it took me nearly half a year to read a book once and not recommended for those who are not used to history books.
Rating:
Summary: No mention of the importance of salt as Christian metaphor
Review: I read this book with the intention of gaining an understanding of why salt was used as a metaphor by Christ. This book does a good job of highlighting how important salt was in days gone by, but as I wrote the author, I found it patently absurd how carefully he avoided any investigation of why salt is mentioned so prominently in the Bible. The impression I came away with is that the author is an elite intellectual and hostile to Christianity. To my mind, writing about the history of salt without mentioning the Bible is like writing about the history of apple pie without mentioning America.
Rating: 
Summary: Great Book!
Review: I really liked this book as interesting history. What really hooked me was the introduction (and later in the body) where the Author describes the old salt mine and castle in Cardona Spain, where my wife had been a couple of years ago. We even got to tour the old mine with its salt stalagtites.
Rating:
Summary: A grain of salt
Review: I thoroughly enjoyed this fine book by Mark Karlunsky. It's a bit long, so I mostly read the text under the illustrations, but I'm pretty sure I got the flavor of the book. Karlunsky is an expert storyteller...I especially enjoyed the section on Galileo showing that milk will sour just as quickly if put on pizza. One time when I was young I asked my mother why our milkman stays at our house for an hour each day.
Rating:
Summary: A book to read with a grain of salt
Review: I was browsing the new releases section of my local library when I happened to see this book. It had an interesting premise, and looked to be unlike any book I'd read before. I've read histories of people and places, but never of ingredients. I checked it out skeptically, and was pleasantly surprised.
Kurlansky is a very talented writer, he manages to make salt suspenseful. The book's purpose is to examine how salt affected the history of the world. He succeeds in this. However, the history is not really coherent, it doesn't really flow. Salt is essentially a collection of vignettes. These vignettes are grouped in chronological order. The first part of the book deals with salt in China and Rome. Part 2 concerns salt's effect in the Middle Ages and the wars of independence. Part 3 concludes the history by examining salt in modern times.
The main failing of this extensively researched account is Kurlansky attempts to link salt to every major world event. According to him, dissatisfaction with the salt tax led to the American and French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution came to be because of salt, and salted foods allowed the world to be explored. Nonetheless, the history is accessible and a fun to read, even if some of the author's conclusions are a bit off base.
Rating:
Summary: Spice of Life
Review: I was really looking forward to this book, and overall I really liked it. Amazing research and great historical facts. Kurlansky sounds like he had a great time traveling the world for this book's research. What a great job! My only complaint is similar to what the other readers have mentioned--it was pretty lengthy and covered such a large span of history. Then again, salt has been around since the beginning... Salt is something that we take for granted now, but in the past it was so precious it was actually used as a currency. Whomever had the salt had the power. Some of the most interesting parts of the book were when the preservation powers of salt were mentioned: The ancient Celts that were found in Hellein, Austria hundreds of years later in the underground salt mine, preserved down to their brightly-colored kilts! My other favorite part was Chapter 22, about the Dead Sea. I really enjoyed reading about this because I was there in 2000 and was amazed and mystified by the awesome lake, and the areas surrounding it. Unfortunately, the Dead Sea is evaporating at such a rapid rate that geologists are predicting that it may not be around in thirty years, and may even dry up before then. I am glad I was able to see this natural wonder before it was too late. Kurlansky's writing style was great, and I am looking forward to reading his other books... one of them is on my shelf, and this book served as the impetus to pick that one up very soon!
Rating: 
Summary: A Terrible, Terrible Book
Review: I'm going to cut to the chase. This is literally the worst book I've ever read, and there's a whole book club full of fellow voracious, intelligent readers who agree with me. Only one of us held on to the last, stultifying page, the rest of us having dropped off well before the halfway mark. Reading even that much was an momentous sacrifice in itself. The book fails in every way: It is poorly organized, hopping around from topic to topic so ridiculously that it's nearly impossible for the reader to get a good general picture of the history of salt. It is incredibly poorly written; I would bet that no editor took a red pen to that manuscript. If one did, then he/she should be fired. I am talking cringe-inducing prose, here. It is boring, unless you like the idea of reading pages and pages and pages about how salt is used to--here's a shocker-cure meat and fish and make pickles. Want to learn, ad nauseum, about fermented fish sauce? This is the book for you! It is sophomoric; there is virtually no original analysis in these pages. The author has done nothing more than take other people's research and put it together in his own way. I learned back in high school that much of the value of a research paper is the original analysis the author provides, which proves he/she has actually done some thinking about the topic. No such thought is in evidence here. This book is nothing more than an tedious research paper that wouldn't garner a C at a decent university. The only reason I bothered to write this review is that I am shocked this book ever got published. Shame on Penguin!
| 
