I'll Have Another

Still trying to catch up on the books I read recently and never posted to the blog.  This month, I sped through a simple book called, The History of the World in Six Glasses.  I bought it because I hoped it would be as good an alternate perspective on global history as were Cod and Salt.  It was not.

The author, and I'll add his name in shortly, posits that what the majority of people were drinking during certain historical ages was significant.  (I carefully chose that word because I really think the book does not successfully argue that these beverages had any cause or effect on history, rather they were more contemporary.)

The reader pub crawls from the cradle of civilization where some poor fellow drank week old gruel that had fermented.   Alas, near beer.  Next stop, Roman and Greek wine, with only the slightest reference to Retsina, and the proposition that wine, per se, creates wine snobs.  The wine gets harder as brandy fills the next glass/chapter.  The reader/imbiber sobers up with the introduction of coffee, then tea, and finally Coke.

What I appreciated more in Cod and Salt was the interweaving of history with commerce and daily life across the continents.  Salt is such an essential of life that it determined where people settled, caused conflict, became industrialized, can be traced linguistically.  Cod was a dominant industry, founded on supply and demand, and essentially an international trade.

The Six Glasses reminds me more of a flight of chards waiting for a plane to depart Austin:  something to fill in the time gap and served in such small portions that only the most superficial of distinctions can be made between the samples.  It only skims the surface of Indian Tea Trading companies and their impacts on India and Asia as well as England.  More successful, but more disturbing, is the treatment of Coca Cola.  Here is a beverage that has mutated into a logo, a drink that notwithstanding its early elimination of coca, is designed and marketed to be addictive and exploitive.  (Have I been getting to many emails from my old left leaning friends to have that word pop up in my blog?)

I would not really recommend this book to anyone, despite the fact that I gave it to my co-worker as a mental debt settlement for keeping her Ann Patchett book while she was out ill.  She really is giving it to her husband anyway.  But I still want to pursue books that look at history by the woof instead of the warp.  I have an earlier volume by the author on a history of food.  Let's hope it is a more substantial amuse bouche.