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Overview

From beer to Coca-Cola, the six drinks that have helped shape human history Throughout human history, certain drinks have done much more than just quench thirst. As Tom Standage relates with authority and charm, six of them have had a surprisingly pervasive influence on the course of history, becoming the defining drink during a pivotal historical period.

A History of the World in 6 Glasses tells the story of humanity from the Stone Age to the 21st century through the lens of beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and cola. Beer was first made in the Fertile Crescent and by 3000 B.C.E. was so important to Mesopotamia and Egypt that it was used to pay wages. In ancient Greece wine became the main export of her vast seaborne trade, helping spread Greek culture abroad. Spirits such as brandy and rum fueled the Age of Exploration, fortifying seamen on long voyages and oiling the pernicious slave trade. Although coffee originated in the Arab world, it stoked revolutionary thought in Europe during the Age of Reason, when coffeehouses became centers of intellectual exchange. And hundreds of years after the Chinese began drinking tea, it became especially popular in Britain, with far-reaching effects on British foreign policy. Finally, though carbonated drinks were invented in 18th-century Europe they became a 20th-century phenomenon, and Coca-Cola in particular is the leading symbol of globalization.

For Tom Standage, each drink is a kind of technology, a catalyst for advancing culture by which he demonstrates the intricate interplay of different civilizations. You may never look at your favorite drink the same way again.

Editorial Reviews

Janet Maslin

Highlights of this drink's long, checkered history include its early links to quack medicinal remedies, the court case United States v. Forty Barrels and Twenty Kegs of Coca-Cola, and the way colorless Coke was passed off as vodka by a Soviet military leader who dared not be associated with such a capitalist totem. Coca-Cola's presence in the hot, parched Middle East is seen as no less tricky. As in the book's other sections, Mr. Standage manages to be incisive, illuminating and swift without belaboring his analysis.
— The New York Times

Publishers Weekly

Standage starts with a bold hypothesis-that each epoch, from the Stone Age to the present, has had its signature beverage-and takes readers on an extraordinary trip through world history. The Economist's technology editor has the ability to connect the smallest detail to the big picture and a knack for summarizing vast concepts in a few sentences. He explains how, when humans shifted from hunting and gathering to farming, they saved surplus grain, which sometimes fermented into beer. The Greeks took grapes and made wine, later borrowed by the Romans and the Christians. Arabic scientists experimented with distillation and produced spirits, the ideal drink for long voyages of exploration. Coffee also spread quickly from Arabia to Europe, becoming the "intellectual counterpoint to the geographical expansion of the Age of Exploration." European coffee-houses, which functioned as "the Internet of the Age of Reason," facilitated scientific, financial and industrial cross-fertilization. In the British industrial revolution that followed, tea "was the lubricant that kept the factories running smoothly." Finally, the rise of American capitalism is mirrored in the history of Coca-Cola, which started as a more or less handmade medicinal drink but morphed into a mass-produced global commodity over the course of the 20th century. In and around these grand ideas, Standage tucks some wonderful tidbits-on the antibacterial qualities of tea, Mecca's coffee trials in 1511, Visigoth penalties for destroying vineyards-ending with a delightful appendix suggesting ways readers can sample ancient beverages. 24 b&w illus. Agent, Katinka Matson. (June) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

More Reviews (1) Fewer Reviews

Kirkus Reviews

Technology historian Standage (The Turk, 2002, etc.) follows the flow of civilization as humanity guzzles a half-dozen prime beverages. First made by nature in prehistory was beer. Finding it good, and more salubrious than plain water, mankind turned brewer. (And so the stage was set for cartoons set in barrooms eons later). From cuneiform beer ledgers, Standage's story hops to Dionysus and the oenophiles of Greece and Rome, who knew as much about the pleasures of the grape as any modern wine snob. Here, we learn the vintage that Caligula preferred. In C-rdoba, distilled spirits formed rum. Allotments of rum, in turn, enhanced the fighting effectiveness of British tars against foreign sailors debilitated by scurvy. The attempt to pay for the recent revolution by imposing federal taxes on independent stills produced the short-lived Whiskey Rebellion in the new United States. Islam eschewed booze, but a sober gift from the Arab world was coffee. In 17th-century Europe, coffeehouses were not only as ubiquitous as Starbucks, they were "information exchanges" where people traded news as "vibrant and unreliable" as that found on a contemporary Internet blog. Tea, which tradition holds was first brewed some 4,500 years ago (our author dates it closer to the first century), became largely controlled, along with opium, by the East India Company. From British tea-time dominance, beverage history goes to that fizzy badge of American hegemony, Coca-Cola. We learn why drugstores once featured soda fountains and how Coke fought Pepsi in WWII. Don't drink the water: throughout history, beer, wine, whiskey, coffee, tea and soda pop were all more potable. Ironically, now that it's bottled and pricey,water seems to making a comeback. Standage offers a distilled account of civilization founded on the drinking habits of mankind from the days of hunter-gatherers to yesterday's designer thirst-quencher. History, along with a bit of technology, etymology, chemistry and bibulous entertainment. Bottoms up! (24 b&w illustrations)

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780802715524
Publisher: Walker & Company
Publication date: 5/16/2006
Pages: 311
Sales rank: 18,969
Product dimensions: 5.53 (w) x 8.26 (h) x 0.96 (d)

Meet the Author

Tom Standage is technology editor at The Economist magazine and the author of four history books, "A History of the World in Six Glasses" (2005), "The Turk" (2002), "The Neptune File" (2000) and "The Victorian Internet" (1998). He holds a degree in engineering and computer science from Oxford University, and is the least musical member of a musical family. He is married and lives in Greenwich, London, with his wife and daughter.

Read an Excerpt

The History of the World in 6 Glasses

By Tom Standage

Walker & Company

Copyright © 2005 Tom Standage
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-8027-1447-1

Chapter One

Fermentation and civilization are inseparable. -John Ciardi, American poet (1916-86)

A Pint of Prehistory

The humans who migrated out of Africa starting around 50,000 years ago traveled in small nomadic bands, perhaps thirty strong, and lived in caves, huts, or skin tents. They hunted game, caught fish and shellfish, and gathered edible plants, moving from one temporary camp to another to exploit seasonal food supplies. Their tools included bows and arrows, fishhooks, and needles. But then, starting around 12,000 years ago, a remarkable shift occurred. Humans in the Near East abandoned the old hunter-gatherer lifestyle of the Paleolithic period (old stone age) and began to take up farming instead, settling down in villages which eventually grew to become the world's first cities. They also developed many new technologies, including pottery, wheeled vehicles, and writing.

Ever since the emergence of "anatomically modern" humans, or Homo sapiens sapiens, in Africa around 150,000 years ago, water had been humankind's basic drink. A fluid of primordial importance, it makes up two-thirds of the human body, and no life on Earth can exist without it. But with the switch from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a more settled way of life, humans came to rely on a new beverage derived from barley and wheat, the cereal grains that were the first plants to be deliberately cultivated. This drink became central to social, religious, and economic life and was the staple beverage of the earliest civilizations. It was the drink that first helped humanity along the path to the modern world: beer.

Exactly when the first beer was brewed is not known. There was almost certainly no beer before 10,000 BCE, but it was widespread in the Near East by 4000 BCE, when it appears in a pictogram from Mesopotamia, a region that corresponds to modern-day Iraq, depicting two figures drinking beer through reed straws from a large pottery jar. (Ancient beer had grains, chaff, and other debris floating on its surface, so a straw was necessary to avoid swallowing them.)

Since the first examples of writing date from around 3400 BCE, the earliest written documents can shed no direct light on beer's origins. What is clear, however, is that the rise of beer was closely associated with the domestication of the cereal grains from which it is made and the adoption of farming. It came into existence during a turbulent period in human history that witnessed the switch from a nomadic to a settled lifestyle, followed by a sudden increase in social complexity manifested most strikingly in the emergence of cities. Beer is a liquid relic from human prehistory, and its origins are closely intertwined with the origins of civilization itself.

Beer was not invented but discovered. Its discovery was inevitable once the gathering of wild grains became widespread after the end of the last ice age, around 10,000 BCE, in a region known as the Fertile Crescent. This area stretches from modern-day Egypt, up the Mediterranean coast to the southeast corner of Turkey, and then down again to the border between Iraq and Iran. It is so named because of a happy accident of geography. When the ice age ended, the uplands of the region provided an ideal environment for wild sheep, goats, cattle, and pigs-and, in some areas, for dense stands of wild wheat and barley. This meant the Fertile Crescent provided unusually rich pickings for roving bands of human hunter-gatherers. They not only hunted animals and gathered edible plants but collected the abundant cereal grains growing wild in the region.

Such grains provided an unexciting but reliable source of food. Although unsuitable for consumption when raw, they can be made edible by roughly pounding or crushing them and then soaking them in water. Initially, they were probably just mixed into soup. A variety of ingredients such as fish, nuts, and berries would have been mixed with water in a plastered or bitumen-lined basket. Stones, heated in a fire, were then dropped in, using a forked stick. Grains contain tiny granules of starch, and when placed in hot water they absorb moisture and then burst, releasing the starch into the soup and thickening it considerably.

Cereal grains, it was soon discovered, had another unusual property: Unlike other foodstuffs, they could be stored for consumption months or even years later, if kept dry and safe. When no other foodstuffs were available to make soup, they could be used on their own to make either a thick porridge or a thin broth or gruel. This discovery led to the development of tools and techniques to collect, process, and store grain. It involved quite a lot of effort but provided a way to guard against the possibility of future food shortages. Throughout the Fertile Crescent there is archaeological evidence from around 10,000 BCE of flint-bladed sickles for harvesting cereal grains, woven baskets for carrying them, stone hearths for drying them, underground pits for storing them, and grindstones for processing them.

Although hunter-gatherers had previously led semisettled rather than entirely nomadic lives, moving between a number of temporary or seasonal shelters, the ability to store cereal grains began to encourage people to stay in one place. An experiment carried out in the 1960s shows why. An archaeologist used a flint-bladed sickle to see how efficiently a prehistoric family could have harvested wild grains, which still grow in some parts of Turkey. In one hour he gathered more than two pounds of grain, which suggested that a family that worked eight-hour days for three weeks would have been able to gather enough to provide each family member with a pound of grain a day for a year. But this would have meant staying near the stands of wild cereals to ensure the family did not miss the most suitable time to harvest them. And having gathered a large quantity of grain, they would be reluctant to leave it unguarded.

The result was the first permanent settlements, such as those established on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean from around 10,000 BCE. They consisted of simple, round huts with roofs supported by wooden posts and floors sunk up to a yard into the ground. These huts usually had a hearth and a floor paved with stones and were four or five yards in diameter. A typical village consisted of around fifty huts, supporting a community of two hundred or three hundred people. Although the residents of such villages continued to hunt wild animals such as gazelles, deer, and boar, skeletal evidence suggests that they subsisted on a mainly plant-based diet of acorns, lentils, chickpeas, and cereals, which at this stage were still gathered in the wild, rather than cultivated deliberately.

Cereal grains, which started off as relatively unimportant foodstuffs, took on greater significance following the discovery that they had two more unusual properties. The first was that grain soaked in water, so that it starts to sprout, tastes sweet. It was difficult to make storage pits perfectly watertight, so this property would have become apparent as soon as humans first began to store grain. The cause of this sweetness is now understood: Moistened grain produces diastase enzymes, which convert starch within the grain into maltose sugar, or malt. (This process occurs in all cereal grains, but barley produces by far the most diastase enzymes and hence the most maltose sugar.) At a time when few other sources of sugar were available, the sweetness of this "malted" grain would have been highly valued, prompting the development of deliberate malting techniques, in which the grain was first soaked and then dried.

The second discovery was even more momentous. Gruel that was left sitting around for a couple of days underwent a mysterious transformation, particularly if it had been made with malted grain: It became slightly fizzy and pleasantly intoxicating, as the action of wild yeasts from the air fermented the sugar in the gruel into alcohol. The gruel, in short, turned into beer.

Even so, beer was not necessarily the first form of alcohol to pass human lips. At the time of beer's discovery, alcohol from the accidental fermentation of fruit juice (to make wine) or water and honey (to make mead) would have occurred naturally in small quantities as people tried to store fruit or honey. But fruit is seasonal and perishes easily, wild honey was only available in limited quantities, and neither wine nor mead could be stored for very long without pottery, which did not emerge until around 6000 BCE. Beer, on the other hand, could be made from cereal crops, which were abundant and could be easily stored, allowing beer to be made reliably, and in quantity, when needed. Long before pottery was available, it could have been brewed in pitch-lined baskets, leather bags or animal stomachs, hollowed-out trees, large shells, or stone vessels. Shells were used for cooking as recently as the nineteenth century in the Amazon basin, and Sahti, a traditional beer made in Finland, is still brewed in hollowed-out trees today.

Once the crucial discovery of beer had been made, its quality was improved through trial and error. The more malted grain there is in the original gruel, for example, and the longer it is left to ferment, the stronger the beer. More malt means more sugar, and a longer fermentation means more of the sugar is turned into alcohol. Thoroughly cooking the gruel also contributes to the beer's strength. The malting process converts only around 15 percent of the starch found in barley grains into sugar, but when malted barley is mixed with water and brought to the boil, other starch-converting enzymes, which become active at higher temperatures, turn more of the starch into sugar, so there is more sugar for the yeast to transform into alcohol.

Ancient brewers also noticed that using the same container repeatedly for brewing produced more reliable results. Later historical records from Egypt and Mesopotamia show that brewers always carried their own "mash tubs" around with them, and one Mesopotamian myth refers to "containers which make the beer good." Repeated use of the same mash tub promoted successful fermentation because yeast cultures took up residence in the container's cracks and crevices, so that there was no need to rely on the more capricious wild yeast. Finally, adding berries, honey, spices, herbs, and other flavorings to the gruel altered the taste of the resulting beer in various ways. Over the next few thousand years, people discovered how to make a variety of beers of different strengths and flavors for different occasions.

Later Egyptian records mention at least seventeen kinds of beer, some of them referred to in poetic terms that sound, to modern ears, almost like advertising slogans: Different beers were known as "the beautiful and good," "the heavenly," "the joy-bringer," "the addition to the meal," "the plentiful," "the fermented." Beers used in religious ceremonies also had special names. Similarly, early written references to beer from Mesopotamia, in the third millennium BCE, list over twenty different kinds, including fresh beer, dark beer, fresh-dark beer, strong beer, red-brown beer, light beer, and pressed beer. Red-brown beer was a dark beer made using extra malt, while pressed beer was a weaker, more watery brew that contained less grain. Mesopotamian brewers could also control the taste and color of their beer by adding different amounts of bappir, or beer-bread. To make bappir, sprouted barley was shaped into lumps, like small loaves, which were baked twice to produce a dark-brown, crunchy, unleavened bread that could be stored for years before being crumbled into the brewer's vat. Records indicate that bappir was kept in government storehouses and was only eaten during food shortages; it was not so much a foodstuff as a convenient way to store the raw material for making beer.

The Mesopotamian use of bread in brewing has led to much debate among archaeologists, some of whom have suggested that bread must therefore be an offshoot of beer making, while others have argued that bread came first and was subsequently used as an ingredient in beer. It seems most likely, however, that both bread and beer were derived from gruel. A thick gruel could be baked in the sun or on a hot stone to make flatbread; a thin gruel could be left to ferment into beer. The two were different sides of the same coin: Bread was solid beer, and beer was liquid bread.

Under the Influence of Beer?

Since writing had not been invented at the time, there are no written records to attest to the social and ritual importance of beer in the Fertile Crescent during the new stone age, or Neolithic period, between 9000 BCE and 4000 BCE. But much can be inferred from later records of the way beer was used by the first literate civilizations, the Sumerians of Mesopotamia and the ancient Egyptians. Indeed, so enduring are the cultural traditions associated with beer that some of them survive to this day.

From the start, it seems that beer had an important function as a social drink. Sumerian depictions of beer from the third millennium BCE generally show two people drinking through straws from a shared vessel. By the Sumerian period, however, it was possible to filter the grains, chaff, and other debris from beer, and the advent of pottery meant it could just as easily have been served in individual cups. That beer drinkers are, nonetheless, so widely depicted using straws suggests that it was a ritual that persisted even when straws were no longer necessary.

The most likely explanation for this preference is that, unlike food, beverages can genuinely be shared. When several people drink beer from the same vessel, they are all consuming the same liquid; when cutting up a piece of meat, in contrast, some parts are usually deemed to be more desirable than others. As a result, sharing a drink with someone is a universal symbol of hospitality and friendship. It signals that the person offering the drink can be trusted, by demonstrating that it is not poisoned or otherwise unsuitable for consumption. The earliest beer, brewed in a primitive vessel in an era that predated the use of individual cups, would have to have been shared. Although it is no longer customary to offer visitors a straw through which to drink from a communal vat of beer, today tea or coffee may be offered from a shared pot, or a glass of wine or spirits from a shared bottle. And when drinking alcohol in a social setting, the clinking of glasses symbolically reunites the glasses into a single vessel of shared liquid. These are traditions with very ancient origins.

Continues...

Excerpted from The History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage Copyright © 2005 by Tom Standage . Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

	Introduction : vital fluids	1
1	A stone-age brew	9
2	Civilized beer	24
3	The delight of wine	43
4	The imperial vine	69
5	High spirits, high seas	93
6	The drinks that built America	112
7	The great soberer	133
8	The coffeehouse Internet	151
9	Empires of tea	175
10	Tea power	198
11	From soda to cola	223
12	Globalization in a bottle	250
	Epilogue : back to the source	266
App	In search of ancient drinks	277

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Anonymous

Posted July 18, 2006

Amazing how drinks affect the world

I originally got this for extra credit for school and thought it would be a boring read, but as I started reading it, I found that I could not put it down. It is amazing how 6 different drinks have affect the world.

3 out of 3 people found this review helpful.
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Anonymous

Posted December 5, 2007

AP World History Review: Impressive Book!

This book was an exciting combination of factual evidence and the following humor resulting from the occureneces of drinking in the different societies of the world. Not only was this book filled with historical evidence, the viewpoint of the importance of these drinks is clearly defined by their use in the many communities of both civilized and uncultivated people. The historical references date back into the time of Mesopotamia, which I found to be highly impressive in itself, and should be a sign to anyone who is debating how good of a comprehension the author had in this subject. The relevance of this article in today's world is immense and easily decipherable. The importance of the diversity in drinks is evident by the clear explanation of the 6 drinks of the world: Beer, Wine, Spirits, Coffee, Tea, and Coca Cola. His thorough descriptions in the creation, uses, and acceptance in society make this book highly educational. Unlike many historical books, this novel allows the reader to enjoy a moderately short jaunt into history. People of any educated age can come to appreciate this book and what it's information determines. I recomend this book to anyone who wants to learn about the history of past empires and civiliztaions. Tom Standage creates a vivid and enjoyable novel that truly defines the ages of mankind into easily understandable sections, so as the reader can fully grasp how the world has evolved since the Mesopotamians to the Civilizations in the world today.

2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Anonymous

Posted August 15, 2005

sip your way through history

refreshingly written, imbibed with all sorts of 'i-didn't-know-that' bits. had no idea how civilization had shifted due to the current beverage of choice. fascinating, totally readable. an unusual and fabulous book

2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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PPeloquin

Posted December 11, 2011

Cheers to history through the beverage glass...

A very unique way of examining the past. This look at the development of various cultures throughout history and the relationship of their major beverages is an original approach, which is both informative and entertaining. Find out how the indulgence in your favorite drink may make you a part of history!

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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NilsB

Posted September 14, 2011

more from this reviewer

A Riveting Way to Learn History

I read this book for World History AP and it is the fastest way to learn about the history of the entire globe. It is not exclusively a western civilization narrative, it covers the ENTIRE world. I recomemend this to anyone, especially if they are not interested in history.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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JasmineS

Posted September 6, 2010

Interesting History!

From bacteria infested water to modern day Coca-Cola, Tom Standage explores all the major eras of the world explaining how "the drink of the time" affected the people, trade, customs, health and social aspects of a civilization. Dating back to 10,000 BC when people began to consume the first alcoholic drink, beer, to modern day times where coca-cola is most commonly served, the book explores who discovered/invented the drink, where it spread to, the methods by which the drink spread, the purpose it served, and how it affected civilizations.

Most drinks where not invented but discovered. The first five drinks (beer, wine, distilled drinks, coffee and tea) origins are lost in prehistory, with no clear time as to where it was created or discovered. Some drinks where restricted to specific religious or ethnic groups while others where widely consumed. Many held religious significance as well, and origins where told through legends and myth. Some drinks promoted key turning points in history and prosperous times for countries across the globe. These drinks became stable food supply and helped carry civilizations to where we are today.

The History of the World in 6 Glasses was an easy read that told how a simple liquid would forever impact history. This book provided an interesting way to display how different drinks raised different lifestyles and cultures. Reading this book I realized just how big of an impact a drink can have on a civilization and its people.

1 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Anonymous

Posted December 8, 2008

AP World History Review: An Intriguing Read!

A History of the World in Six Glasses by Tom Standage is an extremely interesting book that summarizes how society and global evolution took place due, in large part, to the spread and popularity of six defining drinks: beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and coca cola. The author shows his readers how these beverages were extremely important in shaping the many pivotal events of history and how they allowed for transitions in human civilizations and relationships. Using accurate historical evidence along with his astounding connections and descriptions, Standage creates an extremely detailed depiction of the world's history from the origins of civilization to present day society. In my opinion, the author did an impressive job writing this novel, for he was able to consolidate the history of human existence and interactions into a short writing while expressing a convincing and logical explanation as to how six beverages were able to shape the world's history.

After reading this informational, yet enjoyable novel, I was able to clearly understand how something as small as a beverage could immensely sculpt the many peoples and places of history. Tom Standage was able to give me an insight into the world's history through a perspective I had never considered before, and I enjoyed this novel much more than I had anticipated. That being said, I strongly recommend this book to anyone who is curious to how the path of the world's evolution was shaped by seemingly insignificant attributes-beverages!

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Anonymous

Posted April 4, 2012

Awesome

Loved this. Gave how each of these drinks - beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea and cola affected history in their eras and wrapped up where you could find versions of them from those eras.
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Anonymous

Posted March 17, 2012

Interesting read

This is a fairly interesting read although the author seems to be a bit bof a drunk and a caffine addict sinc his fasination with beer and coffee is very apparent
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Anonymous

Posted February 6, 2012

Repetative

With such an interesting and inexhaustable topic I would have thought there would be little room for the author to repeat himself.
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Anonymous

Posted February 1, 2012

I wish I hadn't purchased this book...

I read a sample and thought it looked interesting. But it is pretty boring. Sort of stuffed with statement after statement. No good storytelling or insight.
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bmartinak

Posted February 1, 2012

Review of the Reviews

As an AP World History teacher, I'm somewhat disturbed by the fact that many of these so-called AP students refer to the book as a "novel," which is, as we all should know, a work of fiction, which Mr Standage's book clearly is not.

Beyond that, "Six Glasses" is a fun read, a refreshing new persepctive, and an interesting compaion to Reay Tannehill's "Food In History."
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Anonymous

Posted January 19, 2012

Incredibly informative and interesting

This book covers an amazing amount of information in a unique and often humourous way. It will make even people who say they hate history be entertained. By dividing major shifts in history by the drinks we consume every day, it gives the reader a sense of continuity to the human race. You don't even realize how much you've learned until the book ends in a full circle, both starting and ending with... WATER. By dropping names that we recognize but may not exactly remember what it was they did or when, the book does a fine job of making history make sense. Highly recommend.
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Anonymous

Posted December 4, 2011

AP World History Review: A Fascinating Book!

Tom Standage's novel, A History of the World in 6 Glasses gives a new perspective of tracing the history of the world. The author uses the ingenious idea of using 6 beverages: beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and coca cola to communicate to the reader how our world has the beginning of civilization and Mesopotamia through modern day around these drinks. Standage does an impressive job with connecting all of these drinks to history, and also describing how they shape civilizations and the world's development. One of my favorite connections was how the author describes some drinks importance in religion, as well as society. It was also interesting how the author explains how most of the beverages were in fact discovered, not invented. I would recommend this book to anyone with an interest in world history, or the desire to acquire a new perspective on the development of world civilizations. The reader is also provided with a perspective of the development of the entire world, not just the standard, primarily western viewpoint of development, which I also found intriguing. In addition, Standage does a remarkable job of keeping the reader's attention with a strong voice and new ideas for the reader to contemplate as they read. In fact, as soon as I began to read this book, I found it hard to put down! However, I would not recommend this novel to a person who does not have an interest in history. In my opinion, The History of the World in 6 Glasses was an extraordinary book that was full of historical content that I found fascinating.
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9142770

Posted July 25, 2011

AP world

I chose to read this book as a summer reading project for my world history class. After reading this, I know I picked the right book! If you are looking for an entertaining way to review the history of the world, this is surely the book for you.
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Anonymous

Posted June 29, 2011

Interesting lens to look at history through

No text was provided for this review.
JDGraz

Posted December 28, 2010

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Sip your way though history

Tom Standeage tells the history of the most popular beverages over the history of our society. Entertaining, Enlightening. A valuable look at out history.
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Anonymous

Posted November 8, 2010

AP World History Review (A History of the World in 6 Glasses)

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 Coke and has found many connections 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. This is a great book, and I recommend this book, but mostly to those history lovers. The only problem that I had with this book is that he lists fact after fact. I think that he should separate the book into 6 different books: beer, wine, spirits, tea, coffee, and Coke. I think that he should actually have a character go in that time and find out more about that drink and history, but on the other side, I think this book is great. This isn't a hate, it's just a suggestion, but I really liked this book. So read it!
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Anonymous

Posted May 15, 2010

Ap World History Review: Interesting Book

This was a very interesting book. Tom Standage uses beer, wine, coffee, tea, spirits, and coca-cola. This is different than any other person has before, most people associate and describe the world through war, explortion, and even political power. This is a very interesting and great read, you will enjoy this book if think deep down and inside the ways of all the colonies mentioned and how they are linked to the glass of their time perod.

As we learn early on in the book, most of these beverages were important to the society. The Egyptians used their glass as a form of currency, paying their taxes to the pharoh with it. This was also some of the only drinks (other than water) that these colonies had back then. Coca-cola was not yet invented yet in the time of Wine in Greece. So many Greeks only choice was wine. Coca-cola in the New Wrold was probably the most interesting to me. Standage compares coca-cola to globalization of the world. He not only compares it to globalization, but he links it to the global economy and how massive of an effect it has had.
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MC90

Posted April 25, 2010

History of the World in 6 Glasses

Beverages come into play in all social gatherings, we see this today between friends at a bar watching a game or a group of coworkers at Starbucks discussing their day at work, between businessmen at a conference table breaking a deal or even a shared moment at McDonalds when a father and his son share a Coca-Cola. It is no doubt then that sharing a drink with someone is a universal symbol of hospitality and friendship. These beverages, six in particular, have dominated society: beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and cola. How? Tom Standage's, A History of the World in 6 Glasses, illuminates us on how the history of these beverages have affected our social behavior and therefore led us to the societies we embrace today.When I first starting reading the introduction to this book, I started to wonder immediately, how could a beverage impact a society so much? Well, I was left dumbfounded when I shortly learned that the storage of grains and barley became an essential component for the production of beer and would be one of the reasons why ancient civilizations started to leave the nomadic lifestyle behind in favor of a more settled one. Another fact that fascinated me about the origins of beer was its contribution to writing. Yes, writing was in fact originally invented to record the collection and distribution of goods such as grain, bread, and beer, and the earliest written documents came from Sumerian listings of these products. Beer was a convenient form of currency and being in liquid form and easily divisible, it made an ideal form of currency.The social class division in wealth gave way for the enthusiasm of civilized competition, it reminded groups like the Greeks, how civilized they were in contrast to those who drank "unsophisticated beer." Its rarity probably contributed to its large demand, which gave way for improvement and therefore specialty of wine. For example, Greek vintners adopted the practice of growing vines on stakes in neat rows rather than on trees which allowed more vines to be packed into one selected area, ultimately increasing productions and providing easier access for harvest. Even, Greek writer Thucydides quoted that "the peoples of the Mediterranean began to emerge from the barbarism when they learnt to cultivate the olive and the vine" (52). And in fact, wine had become one of Greece's main exports.Another more chemical beverage known as "spirits" had been discovered through the process which involved vaporizing and the re-condensation of a liquid, created a far higher alcohol content. However, unlike beer and wine, the production of spirits was only known by few and it was only when knowledge of it spread through Christian Europe that it became widely consumed. Its increasing consumption perhaps derived from not only its power to intoxicate quickly and easily, but also its availability in cooler climates where wine was scarce and expensive.After reading this book, I definitely was able to get a better insight on how society can be impacted by the drinks they consume, from the Mesopotamians to the Greeks to the British and up to the Americans, our ancestors all gathered around to have a beverage. Whether it was for survival, war, aristocracy, or pure enjoyment, it has brought people together since the dawn of civilization.
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