In most of the world today, com­mon salt (sodium chlo­ride) is taken for granted; salt shak­ers sit on every home’s din­ing table and restau­rants offer it for free, some­times in con­ve­nient single-serving pack­ets. But salt has not always been so inex­pen­sive or so plen­ti­ful. Humans, like all other mam­mals, need to con­sume salt to sur­vive. Fur­ther­more, until the inven­tion of can­ning in the 19^th cen­tury, salt­ing (or the related process of pick­ling) was the pri­mary method of pre­serv­ing meat, fish, and veg­eta­bles. The abil­ity to pro­duce large amounts of pre­served food has long been a pre­req­ui­site for stag­ing extended mil­i­tary cam­paigns as well as sea voy­ages of explo­ration or con­quest. Thus, the pro­duc­tion and con­trol of salt have done much to con­trol the course of human history.

Mark Kurlan­sky details the chang­ing rela­tion­ships between peo­ple and salt around the world and through­out recorded his­tory. He dis­cusses how salt fig­ures into var­i­ous mytholo­gies and rit­u­als. He talks about meth­ods of salt pro­duc­tion rang­ing from sim­ply scrap­ing crys­tals from desert sebkhas to refin­ing the mate­r­ial with sophis­ti­cated vac­uum evap­o­ra­tors. Par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing are the his­toric recipes he weaves into his nar­ra­tive, includ­ing a bevy of salty sauces: Roman garum, the Chi­nese ances­tor of soy sauce, Tunisian char­mula, and even Louisiana Tabasco. Kurlan­sky also devotes con­sid­er­able time to the salt-related events and poli­cies that have directly shaped his­tory: dis­cov­er­ies, taxes, and monop­o­lies. Along the way he points out how many of our place names — Salzburg, Halles, Gaul, innu­mer­able –wiches — and words — salad, salary, sol­dier, salami — have roots mean­ing “salt.”

This is the sec­ond of Kurlansky’s books that I’ve read, the first being Cod, which shares some sub­ject mat­ter with Salt. He does a very good job of extract­ing excit­ing nar­ra­tives from what at first glance might seem like mun­dane top­ics. He at times seems to ram­ble a bit from one thing to another, but always in a charm­ing — rather than dis­tract­ing — way. I rec­om­mend this book highly, along­side many of the other single-word-title mate­ri­als his­to­ries that I’ve read.

In Thun­der­struck, like in his ear­lier book Devil In the White City, Erik Lar­son fol­lows two men — one a vision­ary and the other a cold-blooded killer. In this case the hero is Guglielmo Mar­coni, the first man to cre­ate a suc­cess­ful method of wire­less com­mu­ni­ca­tion. The vil­lain is Har­vey Haw­ley Crip­pen, a some­time doc­tor and seller of patent med­i­cines who was to all out­ward appear­ances a kind, gen­tle, upstand­ing cit­i­zen. Lar­son fol­lows the lives of the two men from their births in the third quar­ter of the nine­teenth cen­tury until their paths (although not the men them­selves) met in a very pub­lic way in 1910.

Mar­coni became fas­ci­nated with mag­net­ism and elec­tric­ity at an early age. By his early twen­ties, he had become an obses­sive exper­i­menter, spend­ing days at a time in the lab­o­ra­tory he had put together in the attic of his par­ents’ villa. Mar­coni had a basic idea of what he wanted to do — trans­mit a mes­sage using invis­i­ble waves — and how to do it — he had read descrip­tions of ear­lier exper­i­ments by Hein­rich Hertz and Oliver Lodge — but he worked almost entirely by trial and error. It was this approach, that of a prac­ti­cian rather than a the­o­rist, that would later make Mar­coni the sub­ject of other sci­en­tists’ deri­sion. Marconi’s method of work­ing would also prove costly for his wire­less teleg­ra­phy com­pany, as he built ever larger and more com­plex instal­la­tions on the coasts of Eng­land, Canada, and the United States, try­ing to per­fect wire­less trans-Atlantic com­mu­ni­ca­tion with­out hav­ing a firm grasp on the under­ly­ing laws of physics.

Har­vey Crip­pen, trained in home­o­pathic med­i­cine at the Uni­ver­sity of Michi­gan, worked in a vari­ety of med­ical pro­fes­sions. He had a pri­vate med­ical prac­tice in San Diego and was employed as an optometrist in St. Louis, but spent the bulk of his career work­ing for var­i­ous patent med­i­cine com­pa­nies in Philadel­phia, New York, and Lon­don. Crip­pen worked hard to sup­port his wife, Cora, whose exotic tastes in clothes, fur­ni­ture, and jew­el­ery, along with the pur­suit of her unre­al­is­tic ambi­tions of becom­ing a famous singer, proved very expen­sive. The Crip­pens pre­sented the front of a happy cou­ple, but mis­trust, betrayal, and Cora’s con­trol­ling nature lurked beneath the surface.

Lar­son does a won­der­ful job of set­ting the scene for his two sto­ries. Edwar­dian Lon­don is the chief set­ting, as both Mar­coni and Crip­pen spend fair amounts of time there. But the other side of the Atlantic — and indeed the ocean itself — also serve impor­tant roles, as ships and radio waves travel back and forth. My com­plaint about Larson’s pre­vi­ous books has been that his use of dia­log and descrip­tions of indi­vid­u­als’ thought and feel­ings strains his­tor­i­cal cred­i­bil­ity. Lar­son does a much bet­ter job in Thun­der­struck, using less dia­log and more explic­itly cit­ing his sources within the text itself.

I found the two sto­ries fas­ci­nat­ing — espe­cially that of Mar­coni — but through much of the book I felt that the con­nec­tion between the men is ten­u­ous at best. By the end Lar­son makes a pretty good argu­ment for com­bin­ing the two, but I’m not sure that I’m con­vinced. Still, he knows how to tell a good story, and Thun­der­struck makes for a com­pelling read.