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1.0 out of 5 stars Missing pages!
Reviewed in the United States on July 30, 2020

1st 54 pages of book missing! Unprofessional. Buyer beware.

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Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 22, 2022

Who would have thought that was behind so many food innovations and political powers. This truly world view of salts history blends the need for salt to preserve with the economic power that it provided those who produced it. I never knew that we need salt to survive, just as much as food and water. A fascinating and enlightening read.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 9, 2022

This thorough exposition of the discovery and use of salt from pre-historic times until today is fascinating for its impact on world trade, governance and war and peace. We’ll written and always expository, this book is a mountain of information and insight.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 23, 2003

I'm occasionally scolded for using too much salt. SALT: A WORLD HISTORY simply reinforces the fact that NaCl has been in the human diet for millennia. So, get off my back already. If God hadn't wanted me to eat the stuff, he wouldn't have given me kidneys.
Besides being a narrative of how salt has been harvested through the ages, either by brine evaporation or the mining of rock salt, SALT is also a history of its link to food preservation and preparation and governments. Whether it be cod, cheese, herring, ham, beef, anchovies, butter, Tabasco sauce, sauerkraut, pickles, ketchup, or "1000-year-old" eggs, salt makes it happen. And successive bureaucracies over the centuries have harnessed the production, sale and shipment of salt for the enrichment of national coffers through monopolies and taxation schemes, some of them disastrously misguided. Perhaps most illustrative of the latter is the chapter describing Britain's curtailment of indigenous salt production in India during the Raj period. This imperial policy, designed to protect the domestic English salt industry, was of such detriment to large segments of the Indian population that it was the issue that sparked Gandhi's campaign of civil disobedience, ultimately leading to that colony's independence.
I would award five stars except for two statements made by author Mark Kurlansky in his chapter about salt and the American Civil War. These assertions have trivial impact on the book as a whole, but are so sloppy as to make me wonder about the accuracy of his interpretation of more relevant facts.
Regarding Confederate general George Pickett, who received a pouch of precious salt as a wedding gift: "... (he) later reached the most northerly point of any Confederate in combat when he ... led a ruinous charge up a sloping Pennsylvania field - the climax of the Battle of Gettysburg." The author is referring, of course, to Pickett's Charge, and perhaps he was speaking figuratively. While it is fact that one of his brigades briefly breached the Union line at Bloody Angle, it was that unit's commander, Brigadier General Louis Armistead, who was mortally wounded inside the Union position and was arguably the one who led the charge. Pickett wasn't in front on that one. Also, the site of that valiant effort was south of the town of Gettysburg, which had been occupied by the Confederates two days previous.
Further on, Kurlansky trips when describing the Battle of Shiloh in Tennessee as "a standoff". Really? While Federal forces under Ulysses Grant took a shellacking on the first day of the battle, they rallied on the second to drive the Confederates into a full-scale retreat from the battlefield. Moreover, Albert Sidney Johnston, who began Shiloh commanding the Confederate forces and was perhaps the South's most respected general at the time, was killed. Though casualties were roughly the same on both sides, my scorecard has this as a Northern win.
But, I digress.
SALT is one of those books about something we take for granted that captivates the reader with useless but fun facts. Did you know that pastrami (salted beef) is of Romanian origin, that Laplanders drink salted coffee, that a Swedish favorite is salted licorice candy, that 51% of U.S. salt use is to de-ice roads, or that there's a working salt mine 1,200 feet below Detroit?
Curiously, though, Kurlansky says not one word about that most mystical of culinary inventions, salt on french fries - uh, sorry, "freedom" fries. What was he thinking?

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 7, 2003

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.