Book Review : Tea Chings - The tea and herb companion

Today is time for another book review. This book is Tea Chings - The tea and herb companion by The Republic of Tea (hereafter referred to as RoT). I ended up picking up this book on the way to the airport since I knew I had a long layover. This was a mistake.

The book is divided into two main sections Tea and Herbs. The Tea section was a very broad set of information about the assorted forms of tea, and it was a very quick cursory glance of many of the facets of tea. So broad and quick that you learn much more by reading a few of the pages on wikipedia. There was very little to no really unique information to this book. There are many parts where it made me wonder how many people were writing this book, it almost seemed like it was written a page at a time by different people. One section that comes to mind lists different green teas and describes them. In this section Dragonwell and Long Jing were listed separately, even though they are the same tea. The book is also heavily biased toward RoT products. They don't mention them directly, but it is a very noticeable bias. It also lacks some rather important information. For instance in the section it mentions the Indian black tea grading system it forgets to mention the grades of FTGFOP and SFTGFOP, citing TGFOP as "the absolute top grade".

The second section is in regard to herbs. Now I didn't know much about this going in, and figured that it might have some light to shed on the subject, but again the information was so broad and skimming that I know I would have a better understanding from reading some articles in Wikipedia. It glanced at many facets of deriving medicine from herbs and some instances throughout history. This is a much broader topic and should be covered in much more depth than this book.

I don't really want to go into more detail about this book, well because it doesn't even deserve it. I felt that this book was a waste of my time and money for a book on RoT propaganda. I don't recommend this book to anyone and there are much better books out there for the money and overall.

Rating: 0/10