It's not available online, of course ....

... but the new issue of Radar magazine has a nifty little trashing of "cultural histories" -- you know, the books about tea, salt, cod fish, glottal stops, herpes sores, whatever, the ones that trace How Nothing Would Be the Same in Human History Without This Little Item. Although some of the histories have been well-done, instructive, fascinating (Dava Sobel's Longitude, David Friedman's A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis), quite a few, Peter Hyman writes, are little more than gimmicks.

By the way, he calls them "cultural histories" -- inspired by Foucault. book/daddy has heard the term "commodity histories" -- inspired by Marx.