Rating: 
Summary: Wonderful, but too long.
Review: Salt added to the diet is necessary to humans in an agricultural economy. Before refrigeration, it was also necessary as a preservative. Consequently, it has been a primary trade good, either by itself, or in the form of salted foods and sauces. It is therefore quite possible to look at the sweep of history by concentrating on the salt trade, and improvements in technology for acquiring or transporting salt, and get a unique and fascinating view. Remember the 3 way trade between Africa, the Caribbean and the American colonies? Salt even figured importantly in that. Kurlansky often provides peripheral information of high interest, and for those interested in cooking, there are a bunch of recipes from throughout history. I wish that Kurlansky had provided a little more detail on the science of food preservation. More of a concern is that Kurlansky has written an amazingly complete book. For the casual reader it can get to be too much, and I sometime found a need to skim, which is never fun.
Rating:
Summary: Salt of the Earth---Chemical Heritage magazine
Review: Salt is a multidisciplinary historical look at salt, a material closely tied to civilization. As its title claims, it is a history of the world from the perspective of salt. The book is hard to put down with attention grabbing chapters such as 'Salt's Salad Days,' 'The Leaving of Liverpool,' 'The Odium of Sodium,' 'Big salt, Little Salt' and 'The War Between the Salts.' Since the author has received an award for excellence in food writing, it should come as no surprise that the text contains its share of historical recipes.
In the course of the book we are introduced to an astonishing range of cultures and visit many areas where salt has been found and harvested. From Egypt to China, Rome and the Celts, India, Africa and America, the story moves back and forth, skipping between time periods and cultures. The reader is assisted in the journey by well-drawn maps. I especially enjoyed learning about the many ways salt has been harvested, from the sea, evaporating brines or mining rock salt. I also was intrigued by the influence of salt on fields diverse as economics, taxes, politics and technology. For example, we learn about how Gandhi and Indian independence got its start in rebellion against oppressive salt taxes leveled on the Indians so that British salt makers would have a market for their surplus salt.
In the book we meet salt-connected people like Li Bing, governor of what is now Sichuan in 250 B.C.E. and a hydraulic engineering genius. Besides building the world's first large scale dam for flood control and irrigation, and opening up central China for widespread agriculture, Li Bing was the first to drill for salt brine. The author shows how this naturally led to our geologic understanding of salt domes and eventually how to drill for oil in such domes. At this time the Chinese became the first to tax salt and attempt to fix its price, something hard to do with such a cheap and readily available material.
It is in his slant towards food that the author is most comfortable, talking about the many ways salt and food intersect. We and introduced to salt and food preservation, spices and flavorings, sour kraut and salted meat, fish and fishing, even the harvesting and production of caviar. There are two chapters on Avery Island in Louisiana, the first on salt mining by the Avery family which supplied much of the Confederacy's salt, the second on Edmund McIlhenny combining two products of the island ' hot chili peppers and salt ' to make Tabasco sauce.
The book appears to randomly skip around between cultures and time periods, visiting China and America several times. It also ignores any time period later than mid twentieth century and does little with modern, nonfood uses of salt. The author gives no citations or footnotes for his many quotes or facts, relying instead on a fairly extensive bibliography including books and a few articles. While he talks about the science of salt in parts of a few chapters, I would have liked to learn more. He does fairly well with the changes in technology involved with salt. While I enjoyed reading the book it left me with many historical and scientific questions unanswered. Its real strength is in describing the historical relationship between salt and food. I found it pleasant to read.
Rating: 
Summary: Taking a love of Salt to its logical extreme
Review: 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 presentation. The first flaw was in the sheer number of historical snippets that were included. While I'm certain that salt has been important in the broad span of human history, there are a number of these historical anecdotes where he was clearly reaching to demonstrate the influence of salt. Salt may have been involved in these incidents, but it was peripheral at best, and the overall tone sounds too much like cheerleading. Cutting a few of these out would have shortened the book without detracting from the presentation at all. The second flaw was the meandering path that he takes through the history of salt. He generally starts early in history, and his discussion moves along roughly as history does as well; however, he has a tendency to wander a bit both forward and backward without effectively tying all of this together. I'd have preferred to either walk straight through history while skipping around the world (effectively comparing the use and influence of salt around the world) or to have taken more time to discuss why we were rewinding (effectively following one thread to its conclusion and then picking up another parallel one). To me it made the presentation a little too choppy. There have been other criticisms as well; for example, the chemistry is incorrect in a number of places, but if you're using this as a chemical reference, then you've got serious issues with your ability to library research. Of course, that begs the question of what errors are in there that we didn't catch. And it does tend to be a bit repetitive in parts; although, this could have been used to good effect if historical threads had been followed a bit more completely. While I had a few dings on the book, overall I liked it. The fact that I read it end-to-end and enjoyed the last chapter as much as the first is a testament to my general enjoyment of it. It wasn't the best book I read last year, but I'll certainly keep it on my bookshelf. So, back to my original question: does salt merit its own book? Yes, it does, but perhaps in a somewhat shorter form.
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Summary: salterrific!!!!!!! an enjoyable and enthralling read!!!!!
Review: Salt is well written... it opens with a short personal experience which hooked me.... the book covers the historical development/discovery/usage of salt... there is description on the various types of salt and how it is derived.... the author takes you on a globe trotting experince throughtout history...
if you are interested in history or books on everything about "one" thing ..then salt will appeal to you... I love this book!!!!! read it!!!!!! even if you hate reading!!!!
Rating:
Summary: Kurlansky uses salt as a thread to link cultures and history
Review: 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.
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Summary: Salt as focus of world history
Review: The book tells the story of salt throughout world history: how it was made, how it was traded, how it was used, and the effect the salt industry has had on villages, cities, and regions. The book starts and ends in China, first describing the brine wells and the advanced drilling techniques the Chinese invented centuries ago. The text then moves to how salt was used in Roman times describing a sauce called garum made from pickled and fermented fish parts. Kurlansky then continues with Mediteranean fish industry. Salt's main use was in preserving fish. The next big change came when cod was found off the coast of Newfoundland. Cod's low fat meant more salt was needed. Eventually, the American colonies developed their own salt and cod industries. Kurlansky describes the importance of salt in the American Civil War, how salt works led to the marketing of Tabasco sauce, how canals were dug through New York state to take salt from the Great Lakes to the coast. After a quick recounting of how salt was used by Ghandi to spark India's revolution, the book ends back in China and how the salt industry there has moved into the modern age. The old traditional derricks are gone; no one wanted to pay to preserve even the most important ones as historical landmarks. Kurlanski gives a good outline of how salt was taxed in various parts of the world. His description of how the salt tax was an important factor in both the French and Indian revolutions deserves special mention. As he describes how salt was traded and produced, Kurlanky peppers his narrative (sorry...) with short recipes that illustrate how salt was used in different parts of the world and at different times of our history. If you love food and history, you'll love this book. If you love one and only moderately like the other, you'll find the book bogs down a bit.
Rating:
Summary: Take this book with a grain of . . . . .
Review: The history of a mineral...from ancient times to modern. This ought to be a boring book, right? But it isn't. The reason _Salt_ has received many poor reviews is not because it's boring. It's because it's full of mistakes. To give this book 3 stars is charitable, but I DID enjoy large portions of the text and I learned some fascinating things. _Salt_ is a great starting point for research. If you read the book, you will almost certainly find interesting facts that you did not know before. However, before you quote these facts or commit yourself to them in print, be SURE to double check them in qualified sources, because, as other readers have noted, this book is riddled with errors. To identify and discuss all these errors would probably require a book the size of _Salt_. I'll cite one good example here. Kurlansky criticizes Marco Polo for not mentioning the Chinese practice of minting paper money. It just so happened that I was reading Marco Polo alongside _Salt_, and Polo does in fact discuss Chinese paper money at length! Kurlansky's claim is simply not true. To further confuse matters, Kurlansky makes the claim after a list and discussion of legitimate Polo omissions. But he caps this discussion with the claim that Polo doesn't mention paper money, which is patently false. Polo more than mentions it. He mentions which towns use it and which towns don't and talks about it on and off for chapters. So what is going on? To be fair, there are various manuscripts of Marco Polo's in existence, and I have only read one. Scholars believe that some of them were enlarged upon by the monks who copied them. Does Kurlansky perhaps have reason to believe that the "truest" version of Polo does not mention the paper money? If so, his decision to leave out this fact was at best presumptuous. At the least, he should have mentioned that only some manuscripts neglect the money. Instead, he made himself look a fool-as though he just didn't bother to read the book he cited. Anyway, this is an example of the kind of thing he does over and over again. If you actually know something about the subject, you find he's not shooting straight. To be fair, many of these errors seem to occur when he's wandering off on a tangent. When he's sticking to his subject, he seems to hit nearer the mark. Still, his facts ought always to be double-checked. If you have the time and are sufficiently interested, read the book and double check anything you wish to cite. If you don't have lots of extra time, find another source.
Rating: 
Summary: too salty for my taste
Review: The idea of how salt influenced world history sounded like an intriguing read when I first chose this book. However, I was quite disappointed because the book turned out to be mostly about the History of Salt. Your time can be better spent elsewhere considering that the book is also 400+ pages.
Rating:
Summary: Lots of flavor good book for food lovers
Review: This is a comprehensive history of salt, and all the salty dealacies that we love including saurkraut, olives, fish, caviar and tabasco. It also goes throught the technology and politics of salt. It was a very fun read and a good book to remind us of salty foods that we have taken out of our regular diet. I have started having some of these foods as treats because book just wants to make you taste the flavors of salt and the flavors enhanced by salt.
Rating:
Summary: A gem of a book
Review: This is a gem of a book. It discusses and intertwines the history and importance of salt from prehistoric times until now in the context of the various types of salt, preserving and brining meat, fish and other foods, cooking, cheese making, health, geology, geography, place names, world trade, world history, warfare, art and investments, to name a few topics. The descriptions of the role of salt in the American Civil War and the Caribbean islands were fascinating. Then there were the Romans, the Mayans, The Aztecs, the Chinese, the French, the Germans, the English, the Dutch, the Russians, the Scandinavians and others and their involvement with salt. The recipes for cooking with salt are aptly chosen from about 4000 years of recorded history and are remarkably similar to those in use today. The colorful view and history of the San Francisco salt ponds from an airplane were always a bit of mystery to me, but no longer. The origin of towns and cities whose name ends in "wich" was enlightening, to say nothing of Salzburg and the many salt mines in the world. In short, this book is a grand, well-written, informative and often amusing world panorama of salt filled with a host of pearls of learning. It is hard to put down and makes 449 pages pleasantly fly by, leaving you with a taste for more. If you have ever used salt, you really should read this book.
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