The Scents of Eden: A Narrative of the Spice Trade (Hardcover)

My only complaint is that at times the book would give overly-flowery descriptions within the historical context. I understand that this is done to make the book more readable, it just over does it at times. Or it could be that I'm being overly-critical because I read Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel right before reading this (Diamond's book does an absolutely perfect job of walking the line between readability and scientific rigor).

I think about 60% of this book presents interesting and relevant material, but the remaining 40% felt like filler to me. The portions of the book where Corn discusses the key spice-producing islands, their discovery and the imperialistic practices that controlled them, were generally very interesting, and read quickly and with satisfaction. Moreover, I found Corn's writing style generally pleasant to read, and appropriate (or at least acceptable) for "popular" history. The early chapters were among the better ones.

However, Corn doesn't seem to have enough material to make all 319 pages interesting, or perhaps the topic just isn't robust enough for that much book. Either way, I found many chapters off topic, and felt like I was suffering through a droning lecture. For example, Corn provides long descriptions of Amsterdam, London and Salem, none of which seemed more than peripherally relevant to me. More irritating was a rather gratuitous description of Dutch atrocities to both native inhabitants and other pesky Europeans (most notably, the English). While these seemed well documented (among the best documented material Corn presents), I thought he'd made his point adequately in earlier discussions of the topic, and this elaboration didn't seem to add anything to the book.

For my money, "The Scents of Eden" isn't polished enough to make for a serious academic work, and isn't interesting or consistent enough to be top shelf "popular" history. While it had its moments, I found myself struggling through mediocre material in the later parts. And the abundance of chapters that I found off-topic made me question the significance of the entire subject. If you're considering reading this, you may enjoy the book somewhat, but I'd recommend something by Tuchman or Gleeson well ahead of this book.