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From the Author’s Web-site
Mark Kurlansky was born in Hartford, Connecticut. After receiving a BA in Theater from Butler University in 1970, and refusing to serve in the military, Kurlansky worked in New York as a playwright, having a number of off-off Broadway productions, and as a playwright-in-residence at Brooklyn College. He won the 1972 Earplay award for best radio play of the year.
He worked many other jobs including as a commercial fisherman, a dock worker, a paralegal, a cook, and a pastry chef.
In the mid-1970s, unhappy with the direction New York Theater was taking, he turned to journalism; an early interest–he had been an editor on his high school newspaper. From 1976 to 1991 he worked as a foreign correspondent for The International Herald Tribune, The Chicago Tribune, The Miami Herald, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Based in Paris and then Mexico, he reported on Europe, West Africa, Southeast Asia, Central America, Latin America and the Caribbean.
His articles have appeared in a wide variety of newspapers and magazines, including The International Herald Tribune, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Miami Herald, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, Time Magazine, Partisan Review, Harper’s, New York Times Sunday Magazine, Audubon Magazine, Food & Wine, Gourmet, Bon Apetit and Parade.
In addition to numerous guest lectures at Columbia University School of Journalism, Yale University, Colby College, Grinnell College, the University of Dayton and various other schools, he has taught a two week creative writing class in Assisi, Italy, a one week intensive non-fiction workshop in Devon, England for the Arvon Foundation, and has guest lectured all over the world on history, writing, environmental issues, and other subjects. In Spring 2007 he was the Harman writer-in-residence at Baruch College teaching a fourteen week honors course titled “Journalism and the Literary Imagination.” His books have been translated into twenty-five languages and he often illustrates them himself.
He has had 23 books published including fiction, nonfiction, and children's books
Among the awards he has received are:
■ 2011 National Parenting Publications Awards-- gold award for World Without Fish
2007 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Nonviolence
■ 2007 Doctor of Letters, Butler University
■ 2006 Bon Apetit Magazine’s Food Writer of the Year.
■ Cod received the 1999 James Beard Award for Food Writing and the 1999 Glenfiddich Award
■ The children’s book, The Cod’s Tale, received the Orbis Pictus award from the National Council of Teachers of English.
■ The children’s book, The Story of Salt, received the ALA Notable Book Award
■ A Continent of Islands and Cod both received The New York Public Library Best Books of the Year Award
■ Salt received the Pluma Plata award from the Bilbao Book Fair and was a finalist for the LA Times Science Writing Award and the James Beard food writing award.
Mark Kurlansky was born in Hartford, Connecticut. After receiving a BA in Theater from Butler University in 1970, and refusing to serve in the military, Kurlansky worked in New York as a playwright, having a number of off-off Broadway productions, and as a playwright-in-residence at Brooklyn College. He won the 1972 Earplay award for best radio play of the year.
He worked many other jobs including as a commercial fisherman, a dock worker, a paralegal, a cook, and a pastry chef.
In the mid-1970s, unhappy with the direction New York Theater was taking, he turned to journalism, an early interest–he had been an editor on his high school newspaper. From 1976 to 1991 he worked as a foreign correspondent for The International Herald Tribune, The Chicago Tribune, The Miami Herald, The Philadelphia Inquirer. Based in Paris and then Mexico, he reported on Europe, West Africa, Southeast Asia, Central America, Latin America and the Caribbean.
His articles have appeared in a wide variety of newspapers and magazines, including The International Herald Tribune, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Miami Herald, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times, Time Magazine, Partisan Review, Harper’s, New York Times Sunday Magazine, Audubon Magazine, Food & Wine, Gourmet, Bon Apetit and Parade.
In addition to numerous guest lectures at Columbia University School of Journalism, Yale University, Colby College, Grinnell College, the University of Dayton and various other schools, he has taught a two week creative writing class in Assisi, Italy, a one week intensive non-fiction workshop in Devon, England for the Arvon Foundation, and has guest lectured all over the world on history, writing, environmental issues, and other subjects. In Spring 2007 he was the Harman writer-in-residence at Baruch College teaching a fourteen week honors course titled “Journalism and the Literary Imagination.” His books have been translated into twenty-five languages and he often illustrates them himself.
He has had 23 books published including fiction, nonfiction, and children's books
Among the awards he has received are:
■ 2011 National Parenting Publications Awards-- gold award for World Without Fish
2007 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Nonviolence
■ 2007 Doctor of Letters, Butler University
■ 2006 Bon Apetit Magazine’s Food Writer of the Year.
■ 2001 Basque Hall of Fame
■ 2001 Honorary ambassadorship from the Basque government
■ Cod received the 1999 James Beard Award for Food Writing and the 1999 Glenfiddich Award
■ The children’s book, The Cod’s Tale, received the Orbis Pictus award from the National Council of Teachers of English.
■ The children’s book, The Story of Salt, received the ALA Notable Book Award
■ A Continent of Islands and Cod both received The New York Public Library Best Books of the Year Award
■ Salt received the Pluma Plata award from the Bilbao Book Fair and was a finalist for the LA Times Science Writing Award and the James Beard food writing award.
■ 1968 received the ALA Notable Book Award
Review from The Observer (the Guardian Co. UK ) Robert MacFarlane 1/20/2002
Salt: A World History
Mark Kurlansky
Jonathan Cape £17.99, pp484
Commodity history has been the boom genre of non-fiction over the past decade. There have been histories written of the potato (twice), sugar (twice), coffee (thrice), gold (twice), jade, porcelain (splendidly, once), various dyes (mauve, indigo), nutmeg and sundry other spices. At their worst, these commodity histories are complacent annals of consumption; at their best, they up-end our ideas of history's motive forces.
The American food writer and journalist Mark Kurlansky gained fame with the fine Cod: The Biography of a Fish (1997), and in Cod are to be found the grains of Salt, his huge and hugely impressive new book. It was in Cod that Kurlansky first wrote of the 'perfect marriage' between salt and fish, and of how salt could shape history, citing how the Basques' discovery of the preservative properties of salt allowed them to sail further afield even than the Vikings.
Kurlansky's new book is subtitled A World History, and it is one of the few commodity histories to merit such a moniker, because salt isn't just a seasoning, it's a life substance, vital to the proper functioning of the human body. For as long as there have been humans, they've had to find or create salt to live. The history of salt is the history of humanity.
Second only to salt's physiological importance has been its use as a food preservative. It was the only way of decelerating putrefaction until technological advances in the twentieth century, notably the fast-freezing method pioneered by American eccentric Clarence Birdseye, but it remains intrinsic to our lives. Contemporary industry pundits claim salt has more than 14,000 uses.
Every piece of evidence in this book is arranged to point to salt as an agency of enormous power. It has determined the geography of warfare, urban growth (almost all Italian cities were built near a saltworks) and most of the world's trade routes. Kurlansky even links the 'whimsical, non-geometric' pattern of North America's secondary roads to salt: 'The roads are simply widened footpaths and trails... originally cut by animals looking for salt.' These are the salt-lines of history, invisible on a map but brought beautifully to light by Kurlansky.
The book is broadly chronological. We begin at a saltworks in ancient China and end nearly 500 pages later amid the health wars over salt in the twenty-first century. Along the way, the reader is rewarded with superb thumbnail histories of the world's main civilisations; digressions into ketchup, chilli pepper, olives, embalming techniques, pickling and mustard gas; dozens of salty recipes; a beautiful little essay on Matisse, fauvism and anchovy fishermen.
Kurlansky is especially good on the metaphysics of salt, its metaphoric connotations and its religious significances. He draws our attention to the unrecognised ways in which salt has crystallised into our language. Salad is so named because the Romans liked to salt their vegetables. Salacious is from the Latin salax, meaning a man in love: literally, 'in the salted state'. The Roman army paid its soldiers in salt: thus the word salary and, indeed, soldier. And thus 'to be worth your salt', to earn your pay.
If there is a downside to Salt, it's that it lacks the bite of Cod. Cod was the product of a highly sensitive ecological imagination. Infused with a sadness for the passing of the cod, that book was a heartfelt elegy. Kurlansky's latest lacks this unifying attitude and occasionally lapses into a recital of statistics and factoids. Salt is at its very best when it is peppery: there is, for instance, a brilliant and acrimonious chapter on the British salt laws in India and Gandhi's now famous salt march to the Gujarat coast.
This is several books in one: a food history, a recipe book, a travelogue and a cultural history. It contains images which will abide with you: the body of a Bavarian salt miner prised from collapsed salt caves centuries after his death, for instance, perfectly preserved right down to the bright colours of his clothes. It is also stylishly written and wonderfully learned, covering a vast geographical and historical acreage. William Blake famously suggested that the world was to be seen in a grain of sand; Kurlansky has seen it in a grain of salt.
DISCUSSION POINTS
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What did you expect of this book? Did you finish it?
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Have you ever read a similar book, focused solely on a commodity’s influence on history or human behaviors? Would this book make you more or less likely to read such a book?
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What did you learn that you didn’t know before? Did this new knowledge make the book more enjoyable?
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Did you find the information well laid-out and easy to follow? What would have improved the presentation of facts and history?
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What were the resources necessary for large-scale production of salt? How were they depleted and what were the effects?
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How did transportation costs influence the value of any particular salt source? Did the availability of salt, in turn, effect transportation?
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How did ancient civilizations “add-value” to their salt as a trade good?
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Did you know how essential salt is to life and as a strategic need in war throughout history?
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What is your opinion of the history of trade protections various countries and civilizations have had for “their” salt? Can you think of any similar protections currently in place in the US?
Other Kurlansky books I have read:
Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World A history of the cod fishery in the North Atlantic
The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell A history of the oyster fishery in New York City Harbor through its demise in the 1930’s
A book for “foodies”:
Heat [An amateur‘s adventures as kitchen slave, line cook, pasta-maker, and apprentice to a Dante-quoting butcher in Tuscany] by Bill Buford An author’s opportunity to work under “Iron Chef” Mario Batali’s New York restaurant to research a magazine article turns into a Europe-wide pursuit of cooking history.
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City of
Welcome, patrons, to the Coeur d’Alene Public Library Pageturners Book Club. Pageturners Book Club meets on the fourth Wednesday of each month* at 10:15 AM in the Heritage Room. You are welcome to attend as often as you wish and to enter the discussion or just listen. Dates, titles, and discussion leaders are listed below.