Dominique Pasqualini

Wow, this book took me years to finish. I can't even remember which shop I found it in, it was that long ago that it came home with me. It's really two books, one containing photographs of tea and people drinking tea, and the other all text. I kept the book by my bedside for months, only able to read a page at a time before I'd drift off to sleep. The language is rambling and the author is prone to making exhaustive lists, and occasionally repeating things. There are also numerous sentence fragments scattered throughout the text. The saving grace is that it's packed full of information, I often felt like an ignoramus as I was wading through the histories and details of cultivation and serving. It occasionally goes into scientific detail, and is heavy on the Japanese traditions, less so on the Chinese, and dismissive of the French and English tea rituals. The book is also padded out with comparisons and just straight up information about coffee, chocolate and wine.
I would hesitate to recommend this to any one, it's not indexed or separated into useful chapters (the three sections seem arbitrary).… (meer)