Salt: A World History

Structure: ★★ Prose: ★★★★ Pacing: ★★ Intrigue: ★★★ Logic: ★★★★ Enjoyment: ★★★Overall Rating: ★★★A food-focused history of one of the world's most infamous minerals.I love the idea of looking at history through the lens of a particular subject or commodity, but with specific subject matter comes the risk of becoming repetitive or dull. Salt: A World History unfortunately suffers from this. While Kurlansky offers fascinating historical data surrounding salt and its uses around the globe, there's only so many ways you can make preserving food (particularly several types of fish) interesting.The book does provide some intriguing information on cultural uses of salt, like the preservation of bodies in Egypt and the currency of salarium for Roman soldiers. I was, however, hoping to see more of that type of information. Why is salt part of so many superstitions for instance?The structure of the book was a little all over the place, literally. We jump through time and venture different regions of the world somewhat randomly, only to learn how they also used salt to preserve various food. Kurlansky also provides several recipes throughout the book, which is another thing that is interesting until you've read a few, and then they tend to blend into each other.In conclusion, there were some grains of interesting information in a mine of mundane.