Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and IntoxicantsIt began with pepper and other spices, like cinnamon and nutmeg, some eight hundred years ago. Then came coffee, tea, and chocolate, followed by alcohol and opium--all articles of pleasure people in the Western world craved in order to escape from their humdrum lives and heighten their daily enjoyment. How humanity transformed its history in the course of finding the rare condiments, stimulants, intoxicants, and narcotics that helped to make life more tolerable is the story of this rich and captivating book. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, in his engrossing journey through the centuries, documents with a wealth of startling information (and 125 illustrations) how our drive for the pleasure substances we can eat, drink, or inhale fueled the energies of the Old World with an explosive power that propelled mankind across the oceans and into a new age. The urge to please the palate and stimulate, benumb, or pleasure the senses arose at the dawn of the modern age to dovetail with the needs of the rising merchant class and the capitalism it spawned. How the hunger for spices mobilized the Occident's energies with an intensity matched only by today's greed for oil; how coffee became the drink of the bourgeois age as the beverage which, unlike alcohol, promotes clear thinking and hard work; how tobacco became coffee's ally in fine-tuning the fast-paced nervous sensibilities of the modern era--here is a rich human array, an anecdotal history of ideas and beliefs, of fashions, fads, and rituals that orders a treasury of unknown facts in a new way to give us a fresh perspective on our own past and on our present. |
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LibraryThing Review
User Review - wealhtheowwylfing - LibraryThingA history of stimulants and intoxicants in Europe and America over the last two thousand years, with especial focus to the impacts of colonialism and the industrial revolution. Full of fascinating ... Read full review
LibraryThing Review
User Review - Kellswitch - LibraryThing"A well written and informative book without being overwhelming. This isn't the most in depth book or look at these topics but it did give me some new perspectives on trade and goods, especially "addictive" goods than I had before." Read full review
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Common terms and phrases
advertising alcohol ancien regime Arabic aristocratic became beer Beer Street bourgeois breakfast CARICATURE Chinese chocolate cigar cigarette cinnamon cocoa coffee and tea coffee drinking coffeehouse consumed consumption culture drinkers drinking ritual drugs drunk drunkenness East India Company effect eighteenth century England English Europe European French function Genussmittel George Sand German gestures Gin Lane guests hashish hashish and marijuana hot beverages illustrations important industrial inebriation intoxication liquor Lloyd's Lola Montez London luxury marijuana medieval Middle Ages middle-class modern narcotics nineteenth century opium Orient Paradise pepper period pharmacological pipe pipe smoking pleasure potlatch restaurant Rococo role round salt saucer sense served seventeenth and eighteenth seventeenth century significance sixteenth century smoking snuff taking snuff tobacco snuffbox sober social society specific spice trade status symbol stimulating substance taste tavern teenth century temperament things tion tobacco traditional tury wine women workers
Bibliographic information
| Title | Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants Vintage Series |
| Author | Wolfgang Schivelbusch |
| Edition | illustrated, reprint |
| Publisher | Vintage Books, 1993 |
| ISBN | 067974438X, 9780679744382 |
| Length | 236 pages |
| Subjects | › History / World Social Science / Customs & Traditions |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |