Green Gold [Book]

[MEversbergII]

I'd had this book on my wish list for a while:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1002218.Green_Gold

So I picked it up a couple months ago and gave it a read through. Generally it's an easy read, and gives us a first hand remembrance of the tea plantations as they were around the second world war, and then some research on how things were after. The authors are a mother/son pair, with the former having moved onto the plantation, if memory serves, sometime in the 30's.

It goes on about the history of tea, puts forward some ideas as to how tea helped eastern civilizations densify their cities so well, and gives several first-hand accounts via letters written by people involved in turning Assam into a tea producing region. Turns out there were tons of setbacks - it took many, many years to pull off.

It also gets into the racially driven decisions on employment, touches base on just what the impact of tea demand was in England, and gives a little on technological inventions on the processing of tea, and tea's effect on technological spread. It also gives us some anecdotes around the dark side of how the Assam-region-employed tea workers were treated, both medically and socially, and (most importantly) the reasons for it, and what impact it had on these people who lived in "the lines".

100% factually accurate? Unlikely; few people are that good. A good read? Sure. I think I got mine used on Amazon for about 10USD, so it's very accessible. It looks a bit thick, but the book itself isn't very large, definitely less "tall" that most other things on my shelf.

We're all tea people here, so I would recommend it to the membership at large. This is definitely not a text book, and I'd suggest following up on anything that sticks out and grabs your attention, but otherwise it's a good read - I gave it 3/5 over at Good Reads, which is "I liked it" level.

M.

[Evan Draper]

A fun reminisce; worth getting from the library.