This is a very personal history of tea cultivation in India. The authors are the son and wife of a Scott who managed an English tea plantation in India for 20 years, starting sometime in the 1950s. The son is a social anthropologist. The book moves back and forth from Iris's personal and moving story of what it was like to be a tea manager's wife, and the cultural, social, and political history of Indian tea, particularly in the Assam region. I picked the book up because I'm not only a tea snob, but I'm an tea snob who prefers Indian tea and who's tea of first choice is an Assam -- you can keep your wimpy Darjeelings and Himalayan teas, give me a tea that will peel paint off the walls any day.

Ahem. Back to the book. I found it compelling because of my personal interest in the subject, but it wasn't very well written. It was obviously written by two separate hands and in parts (most notably the section on tea and health) relied far too much on questionable secondary resources (like newspapers), when the primary resources (like reports of study results) wouldn't have been that hard to find. Some sections, notably (1) Iris's personal accounts of trying to help the plantation workers, and (2) the history of how plantation workers were used (and abused) by the English in the World War II war effort, and (3) the sections arguing that tea made concentration of large populations possible because you have to boil water (thereby killing bacteria) to make the tea, were fascinating. I would recommend the book to someone with an interest in either the history of tea or the exploitation of India by the British, but would suggest picking and choosing among the sections.