Tastes of Paradise

From the extravagant use of pepper in the Middle Ages to the Protestant bourgeoisie's love of coffee to the reason why fashionable Europeans stopped sniffing tobacco and starting smoking it, Schivelbusch looks at how the appetite for pleasure transformed the social structure of the Old World. Illustrations.Wolfgang Schivelbusch was born in Berlin in 1941 and is a German scholar, historian, and author. In 2003 he was awarded the Heinrich Mann Prize of the Academy of Arts in Berlin. He currently lives in New York.