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Tastes of paradise can shatter mirrors
I’m not in the habit of compulsively re-reading books, even those of the highly influential sort.
Of course, there are exceptions:
- The early beer writing of Michael Jackson
- “The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History,” a sobering tome by John Barry
- Jim Bouton’s ribald baseball tell-all, “Ball Four”
- “A Confederacy of Dunces,” the classic New Orleans comic novel from John Kennedy Toole
Another is “Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants and Intoxicants,” by the wonderfully named Wolfgang Schivelbusch. He is not a Groucho Marx character from Duck Soup, but a German-born cultural historian operating from a decidedly (Karl) Marxist perspective.
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