Tulipomania : The Story of the World's Most Coveted Flower & the Extraordinary Passions It Aroused

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Summary: flowerpower
Review: Mike Dash has written an engaging work on a rather obscure subject-tulips. I bought this work to find out about his style before reading "Batavia's Graveyard" and found it enjoyable. My only real quarrel with Dash is his tendency to skip around on dates and events. It is quite distracting.

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Summary: An easy, in-depth read
Review: Mike Dash's "Tulipomania" is typical of the current crop of "popular" history books. Much like Dava Sobel's "Longitude", Mr. Dash takes a narrow topic/event and dissects it in great detail, while presenting his findings in a manner that is palatable to the academic and non-academic alike. The Dutch Tulip Craze of 1636-37 is one of the most overworked stories in the world of business, but Mr. Dash does well in interweaving his narrative of the Craze with anecdotal stories of the famous and common people whose lives were affected. The description of economic conditions and everyday life are rich and detailed. (Anyone in the brewing industry will salivate at the beer-consumption figures for Haarlem in 1636!) But the book does not get bogged down in detail and keeps a fast pace. Though not as strong as "Longitude", "Tulipomania" is a worthy addition to the canon of microhistorical works.

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Summary: One of the best-written history books you'll read
Review: Tulipomania is an amazing story, wonderfully told. Author Mike Dash has an easy, natural writing style, but he's also a gifted historian - Cambridge-educated, and with a PhD to boot, which makes him among the best qualified of all the writers in the narrative non-fiction genre. And, boy, can he write. To assemble, as Dash has done, more information on the tulip mania than any previous writer (comparing his account to the jejeune and utterly uniformed speculations of Mackay is like comparing a gourmet dinner to a tin of spaghetti) would be an achievement in itself. But the author has not only scoured not only the literature in English, Dutch and German, but also dredged through Dutch archives that have remained untouched for literally centuries - and still managed to turn out a book that is fast-paced, enticingly written and an example of how to move along a history that spans two continents and several decades. Very highly recommended indeed, to all lovers of good history.