Tulipomania

The Story of the World's Most Coveted Flower & the Extraordinary Passions It Aroused

De: Mike Dash

Narrado por: James Cameron Stewart

A vivid narration of the history of the tulip, from its origins on the barren, windswept steppes of central Asia to its place of honor in the lush imperial gardens of Constantinople, to its starring moment as the most coveted - and beautiful - commodity in Europe.

In the 1630s, visitors to the prosperous trading cities of the Netherlands couldn't help but notice that thousands of normally sober, hardworking Dutch citizens were caught up in an extraordinary frenzy of buying and selling. The object of this unprecedented speculation was the tulip, a delicate and exotic Eastern import that had bewitched horticulturists, noblemen, and tavern owners alike.

For almost a year, rare bulbs changed hands for incredible and ever-increasing sums, until single flowers were being sold for more than the cost of a house. Historians would come to call it tulipomania. It was the first futures market in history, and like so many of the ones that would follow, it crashed spectacularly, plunging speculators and investors into economic ruin and despair.

This colorful cast of characters includes Turkish sultans, Yugoslav soldiers, French botanists, and Dutch tavern keepers - all centuries apart historically and worlds apart culturally, but with one thing in common: tulipomania.

©1999 Mike Dash (P)2018 Tantor

Extremely Thorough

I'm sure it took a tremendous amount of research to write this but it's maybe not the best in audio book form.

Too Detailed

Listening to 8 hrs. about tulip mania in Holland was just too much for me to absorb. The author's research and detail is outstanding but I felt it not so necessary for the average reader to know every single grower, buyer and seller's name, etc. I perhaps would have gotten more out of the book, which I read for discussion in a book club, if it would have been an actual book I could have browsed through to see pictures of the many varieties of tulips mentioned so the relevancy of prices paid would have more meaning.
For my first book, I feel the audio version just was too difficult and long for me to take in all I wanted to know about this time period.

Accounting facts of Tulip Trade

The endless reciting of prices was not interesting. I expected a rich cultural history of tulipmania and instead I just heard how much each species was worth in different years. Very disappointed.