by Tom Standage Non-fiction This is a fascinating book that covers the effects that six significant beverages have had on the shaping of history; beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea and cola. I had already known about the ancient origins of beer, but learning that wine was originally distilled by...
TITLE: Seriously Curious: The Facts and Figures that Turn Our World Upside Down AUTHOR: Tom Standage (Ed.) DATE PUBLISHED: 2018 FORMAT: Paperback ISBN-13: 9781610399937 _____________________ DESCRIPTION: "Smart, savvy answers to universal questions, from the highly popular The Econo...
In an age when chess-playing computers are hardly a novelty, it might be hard to imagine just how remarkable people found Wolfgang von Kempelen’s automaton. Though little remembered beyond a handful of afficionados today, Kempelen’s Turk was a remarkable novelty in its day, one that delighted the H...
The author provides an interesting perspective on the influence that various drinks had on civilization, culture and the spread of ideas and empires from the Stone Age to the 21st Century. He starts of with beer in Mesopotamia and Egypt; progresses to wine in Greece and Rome; then the concoction an...
This book discusses the rise of six drinks as alternatives to water and some of it was actually rather interesting. Some of it was known to me, of course, but the couple of chapters for each drink gave a nice overview and I did learn a few things. I shouldn't have to praise this but no physical desc...
This was...horrible. I don't know that I can put into words how I feel about this book, though I've tried during rants to three different people about this...book. (eye twitch) So sorry, but you're the fourth (fifth, sixth, etc). Hopefully by now I have things lined out in a somewhat understandabl...
A very broad, breezy, introductory overview of the history of food/ agriculture. The book was interesting even if it didn't cover anything terribly new. A "salad" book. No meat.
I didn't enjoy this as much as Standage's History of the World in Six Glasses. There were lots of interesting nuggets in this book, some were cool trivia about the role of food in various phases throughout history, other nuggets shed light on our perspective on food today, calling into question wha...
A fine book (narrated well by Simon Vance), with a fine thesis, but the middle bit tends to sag as it is merely a short history of media. It does make it a good book for the ages, when we are all watching trideo, jacked into the matrix through direct neural links, but it does make it longer than it ...
Writing on the Wall is about all of the ingenious and fascinating ways that information has been transmitted over the centuries. The author is able to draw surprising parallels between ancient media and the social media of today. These comparisons inform discussions of issues still relevant today, s...
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