Customer Reviews

A History of the World in 6 Glasses

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This is a good example of why history is fun. Tom Standage has investigated the origins of six beverages: beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and Coca-Cola and has found innumerable connections, interconnections, and insights into not only the histories of the drinks themselves but also their impacts on the larger human story. The links Standage finds, for example between coffee and the Enlightenment or tea and the Opium Wars or wine and beer and their effect on class and cultural tensions in Greece and Rome, just a few of the many insights you'll find in the book) are fascinating. Standage also provides one of the most succinct but thorough dissections of the globalization debate I have ever seen in his coverage of "Coca-Colonization."

A History of the World in Six Glasses is much more than just a history of six beverages. It is history as it should be written (and taught).

What can you say except, "I'll drink to that."

As I first started looking at this book I was reminded of James Burke and his 'Connections.' Like Burke, Mr. Standage looks at the six (well maybe seven) drinks that basically were a technology that changed history.

To illustrate this I'll talk about only one of his drinks -- Beer. Beer probably began as some leftover cooked grain, perhaps the kids morning cereal, was left outside in the rain. Soaking in water, it turned into malt. Wild yeast fell into the mix, and in a few days the result was beer. While I'd bet it was foul tasting beer, it was the only alcoholic beverage around.

OK, so you have beer, how does this mean anything? Well, to get more beer, you need more grain. To get more grain you basically move from being a hunter-gatherer to a farmer. You also need the ancillary technologies of pottery to make and store the product. If you have beer, and your neighbors have food, perhaps you can make a trade. Expand on this and you have a need for writing, for record keeping, for accounting. And with accounting can the tax people be far behind? And that's not all. No pathogen lives through the brewing process, so all of a sudden you have a beverage that's safe to drink, cutting down on illnesses. Think about all that the next time you sip a brew.

Surprisingly, a lot of the glasses Mr. Standage talks about have this same factor of sterilizing the water, thereby cutting down on disease.

A delightful book, now if we can only get it made into a TV series.

Do you ever wonder where some people find the most interesting things to say at parties -- like how tea aided longevity in China or raised life expectancy in Europe ?

Well it is this kind of book that drives that knowledge. Standage has created a very enjoyable, brisk read that is definately for fun and to load up on fun facts.

By telling the world's history in six glasses (see below) Standage covers alot of ground and sure he misses alot, but its still fun non-the less.

1) Beer -- a basis for why people replaced hunting with farming
2) Wine -- the civilizer of Greece and Rome
3) Hard Spirits -- slavery, the American Revolution
4) Tea -- the life sustainer and improver
5) Coffee -- the fuel for the enlightenment
6) Cola -- particularly Coca-cola the expression of cultural dominance.

Sure you have heard some of these stories before, but this book presents history in a fun and entertaining light. So when you go to order your next beer know that you are engaging in high civilization even in a sports bar.

An entertaining and easily-read book that casually traces the impact of beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea and Coke on human history. There are a few new tidbits of information and interesting factoids, but nothing particularly earth-shattering here. If you're looking for intriguing details on the order of "Salt: A world history" or "Potato: How the humble spud changed the world" you'll be disappointed. That said, this is a good starting point for anyone interested in learning how consumables can impact history. An Amazon reviewer referred to one of the author's other books as a 'McBook' which is probably equally accurate here. But there's certainly room in the world for the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries. It may not be tremendously nutritious or flavourful, but it's tasty enough.

Breathing is essential, but the air is free and no one has found a way to make it special enough that people will pay for the privilege, unless you count the hits of pure oxygen that some favor. Eating is essential, and of course there are countless ways that the activity has been turned into a trade. Between them, as far as the body's needs go, is drinking, that is, drinking water, and while there is a pretty good trade in more-or-less pure water, it's the stuff that is added to water that has changed history. Or, at least, that is the view of Tom Standage in the sprightly _A History of the World in 6 Glasses_ (Walker & Company). An overview of world history that is based on what people imbibe might seem to be a theme too narrow to tell us much, but this enjoyably breezy overview looks into science and culture through the millennia and shows that humans took a physiologic necessity and used it to shape the ancient, classical, and modern worlds.

Beer, for instance, gave us history itself. The workers who built the pyramids were paid in beer, and Egyptians would greet each other with the phrase "Bread and beer," a genial wish for prosperity. The pictures of Egyptians enjoying their beer show them doing it together, using straws communally inserted into a big jar of beer; using straws kept the floating stuff at the top from being ingested. Wine, by contrast, was the drink of the elite ever since it spread through ancient Greece. It is remarkable that thousands of years later, though the categories have merged somewhat, beer has remained the working man's everyday drink while wine has remained an exotic, fit for connoisseurship and social differentiation. Rum was "The world's first global drink" and a key part of the slave trade as well as of the American drive to independence. George Washington eventually distilled whiskey at Mount Vernon, but when he campaigned for the House of Burgesses in 1738, he distributed, besides wine and cider, twenty-eight gallons of rum and fifty of rum punch. This went to a county with only 391 voters. The use of coffee took off in European coffeehouses, and the tradition of coffee being a thinking beverage continues; we have Internet cafés rather than internet bars. Tea was a perfect drink for sober, productive attendants of the machines that powered the industrial revolution, and tea breaks were part of the job. Coca-Cola was sold until 1865 as a medical elixir, but since not everyone is ill but everyone gets thirsty, it was thereafter marketed as a drink, not a drug. Coke was an all-American drink and the harbinger of the consumerism of globalization, largely due to its participation in World War II. Soldiers all over the world wanted this liquid bit of home while they were overseas, and the Coca-Cola company was happy to oblige them, especially since it got an exemption from sugar rationing as a product essential to the war effort. The soldiers eventually came back home, but the company continued distribution to the locals.

Standage comes around in an epilogue to our basic beverage, water. There is an amazing paradox that now in nations which have good water supplies, people are bypassing them to buy bottled water. This is despite bottled water having no real advantages; it is not more nutritious or pure, and it might even be more likely to grow germs. It also costs hundreds or thousands more than tap water. But trendy bottled waters are not really a problem; access to water is, with a fifth of the world's population not having reliably safe drinking water. Water wars loom in various areas of the globe, and may well do as much shaping of our future as the other six drinks have in bringing us to the present. Standage's entertaining tour of thousands of years of drinking history makes plain that what we drink will continue to change the world in unexpected ways.

This book is evidence of the power of a good idea to organize one's thoughts and arguments so as to make them compelling. Other than the air we breathe, which hasn't really changed all that much over the years, there is nothing so universally important as liquid refreshment. Mr. Standage's decision to structure his history of the world upon beverages is brilliant. It is precisely because the drinks discussed remain so familiar to us that the history is so relevant and interesting. Though we understand quite well why alcohol has such a prominent place in history, who would have thought that water itself is only now just emerging as the drink of choice? or that the antibacterial properties of Tea supported the industrial revolution. True, the bias is towards Western history--but as that is my history, I'll take it.

We are surrounded with objects that we take for granted and there are any number of great books that spin the historical tale around such objects; however, this work excels because of its brevity--the author manages to cover the topic without the pace of the book ever lagging. The lawyer in me appreciates a finely honed argument; Standage's book is so good that he makes the supremely difficult job of summarizing world history look easy.

Many authors of history are unable to prune the many fascinating insights that history presents. And to be sure, I enjoy a nice meandering presentation of interesting tidbits organized around a central theme, but it is always refreshing to find a history that has the same "can't put down" type of feel as a thriller or mystery. I can't think of a more excellent example of a history that is both appropriate for a younger student as well as an overeducated adult. Highest Recommendation.

I can't say enough good things about this book. A great subject and a fine read. I found it fascinating and finished it in just three days. An accessible book for readers who don't normally pick up non-fiction books, yet detailed enough for history fans. It would've been nice to have at least a mention of hard apple cider, which was important in early American history because the fermentation process kills bacteria, making it safer to drink than well water at the time. But Standage makes a compelling case as to the importance of each of the six drinks he profiles.

Standage decided to write the history of the civilized world not by tracing the histories of kings, popes, wars, and explorers, but with beer, wine, coffee, tea, spirits, and soda. The result is such an incredibly interesting and entertaining read, that one wonders if historians have been concentrating on the wrong subjects all along.
From Standage we learn that the earliest of these beverages were critical to the establishment of organized human societies. They served as important water purification systems, and also as the earliest forms of hard currrency.
We also learn why Greeks added water to their wine, why England became a tea drinking society, and while France embraced coffee. The discussion of Coca-Cola and its role in the globalization age is one of the best I've read on the subject of the ever more intergrated global economy.
Standage comes full circle with an Epilogue on plain old water, and the potential in certain regions of the globe for future political and military conflicts over the control of this limited and valuable resource.

Great History even if told through liquid refreshments. One is struck by how history can be viewed as the enrichment of previous experiences, inventions and ideas into greater and greater quality....witness the advent of language to the alphabet to temple reports to fiction to electronic media. In this case it is the liquids we drink and the fascinating way they were discovered, produced and how they changed society. We in the West are well-acquainted with these whereas some parts of the world (Muslim areas) banned many of these and thus did not undergo (for good or bad) the various social changes they wrought.

The work is short, simple, pleasing and - except for a couple of quibbles - factual. Don't look for detailed analysis or sweeping statements of unique import - just six good stories of a drink and how they changed the world today.

The title of this book might make you think this is just about the history of some beverages.

Yes you learn how beer came about, wine, etc. But what makes this book most fascinating is how it connects everything with society both past and present. Each section is entertaining and goes on some relevant tangents giving some insightful tidbits about things such as the Industrial Revolution, the Greek way of life and how coffee fueled important ideas and revolutions. Some portions are very funny and entertaining while some parts are very serious and might give some some readers a different take on how their beverage consumption might affect someone a thousand miles away.

Bottom line: this is a fascinating book that really makes you think a little differently each time you fill whatever cup, mug or glass you've got in your hand.

[AND OF COURSE ...what better way to relive history than to drink the appropriate beverage along with their corresponding chapter(s)?]