Something different among the freebies today:
The Gunpowder Gardens or, A Time for Tea: Travels Through India and China in Search of Tea by Jason Goodwin
Armchair travelers and tea connoisseurs will welcome English writer Goodwin's lively treatise cum travel book on the cultivation and trade of tea. Starting in southern China, where cha originated as the drink of emperors, he follows the trail to today's English cottages and London drawing rooms. Each distinctive blend of tea is credited with unique medical and other properties, from rare lc per web oolong picked from 1000-year-old bushes to Darjeeling, grown in the gardens of Assam and traded at the world's largest tea auctions in monsoon-drenched cosmopolitan Calcutta. In each region Goodwin also observed the special rituals and appurtenances used to serve tea. The author interweaves wonderfully sensual evocations of place and offbeat encounters with the historical and economic roles of tea in lands that produce it, while also surveying the influence of tea trade on international relations.