Indulgence: Around the World in Search of Chocolate

The food of the gods has never had a greater appeal among mortal women - and most men - the world over. As a foodstuff, chocolate has been swooned over endlessly in print, but Paul Richardson's study offers to take the subject into whole new realms. Using a melange of travel narrative, historical writing and literary gastronomy, he discovers a substance that still has much to say about the joys and agonies of our human debt to pleasure. In his history of one of mankind's ruling passions, Paul Richardson concludes that, despite the wholesale debasement of a once-sacred substance, chocolate has not entirely lost its mysterious capacity to bewitch.