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A review by acrickettofillthesilence
Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky
2.0
You know you're a writing tutor when you fantasize about conversing with the author over his organization strategies.No, seriously. I had an entire dialog in my head about it. How did you organize this book? Does each section have a main concept or idea? Does every chapter and/or paragraph help move towards this idea? Can you find any that don't? Let's read through some of these paragraphs together and you can tell me where you think something might be tangential to the main idea.
This book meanders. It shares an interesting perspective on history based on one trading commodity, but sections, paragraphs, and even sentences within paragraphs will go off on a somewhat related topic and then return to the original topic as though it hadn't even left. One memorable example of this: I read a paragraph about the Egyptians making salt that, in the middle, incorporated a sentence about their trade with the Phoenicians, and then the next sentences finished the explanation salt making.
Some might like their nonfiction to take the scenic route to every idea; I discovered through this book that I am not one of those people.
This book meanders. It shares an interesting perspective on history based on one trading commodity, but sections, paragraphs, and even sentences within paragraphs will go off on a somewhat related topic and then return to the original topic as though it hadn't even left. One memorable example of this: I read a paragraph about the Egyptians making salt that, in the middle, incorporated a sentence about their trade with the Phoenicians, and then the next sentences finished the explanation salt making.
Some might like their nonfiction to take the scenic route to every idea; I discovered through this book that I am not one of those people.