Summary Of Salt By Mark Kurlansky

Salt is modern book written about the history of salt and its effect on the events of the past. The book maintains a semi-chronological flow to it. It is nonfiction and there are no characters. Salt has had an effect on the past that is often overlooked, but not by the author of Salt, Mark Kurlansky.
Salt takes you through the history of the only edible rock. It begins talking about the sexuality of salt as a hook, then begins talking about the nutrition of salt. The rest of the book is about different cultures, inventions, countries, and anything else that has a relation to salt.
The bias in this nonfiction book is minimal, but still existent. A beneficial bias that this book contains is a positive view of salt, which help to make it less boring. This is made evident by the author opening with an explicitly biased statement, “Those who think a fascination with salt is a bizarre obsession have
Upon reading the book I read nothing that seemed to be neither incorrect nor biased. I searched the internet for anything this book might have been inaccurate on and I found no results. After reading Salt, it really hit me how much of a major resource salt was to ancient people. The primary use was preservation and nutrition, but both of those were necessary to life. In the Revolutionary War, I found it particularly interesting that the British focused on destroying the salt works of Louisiana. Overall, I feel that Salt is a very informative book with plenty of information that can be applied from science, to history, and to politics. The knowledge and detail from this book could inspire the reader to want to learn about the history of other places and people, even if they don’t find salt particularly interesting. The message of the book cannot be summed up any better than the closing statement, “Fixing the true value of salt, one of earth’s most accessible commodities, has never been easy (Kurlansky