It 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.
