This book started out exciting and became tedious. I loved the early chapters which traced the progress of civilization and how it was tied in with salt production. The Chinese discovered natural gas while salt mining. The Egyptians began preserving food and bodies thanks to salt. The book follows salt production and trade through ascending peoples such as the Celts, Romans, Venetians, the Basques, the Norse, the English. I got a little bored with the chapter on herring, but found the subsequent chapter on the salt mines in Germany and England to be quite fascinating. I learned that English city names that end in –wich were the sites of major saltworks. It also never occurred to me that religious restrictions on certain foods were in place to promote the fishing industry or encourage the rich to purchase exemptions to said restrictions from the church. Midway through the book I realized that we were up to the Industrial Era. What would fill up the rest of the book? A lot of boring stuff: chemistry, geology, and hyperbole about how salt caused revolutions in the 17th and 18th centuries. I began to miss the chapter on herring. The author pulls it together a little towards the end (I found the chapter on the unique salt mining in the Sichuan Province fascinating) but by then I was ready for it to be over.