Tea Blog

How should one conduct oneself at a tea party? Well, if you’re going to learn how I guess the key is to start young. Which is where a book like Tea Party Rules, by Ame Dyckman, might come in handy. It’s geared at tea partiers aged 3-5 and is described as a “laugh-out-loud funny look at the required give-and-take of playtime.” Aimed at a slightly older group (grades 3-5), Russell Freedman’s recently released book takes a look at a tea party of a different sort, specifically the one that took place in Boston Harbor a few hundred years ago. It’s titled, appropriately enough – The Boston Tea Party.

I’m not quite what angle Penny Stanway is aiming for with her Miracle of Tea: Practical Tips for Health, Home and Beauty and since the book is not out until later this year it’s hard to pin down too many details. It remains to be seen, though the publisher’s description gives a little more to go on, “there are so many different teas from around the world waiting to be discovered and experimented with, and which will do wonders for your beauty and your garden. Most importantly, Stanaway shows that teas are a key component of a healthy diet.”

If you’re interested in more possible connections between tea and health you might want to keep an eye open for Tea Therapy: Natural Remedies Using Traditional Chinese Medicine, by Lin Qianliang, Chen Xiaoyi and Liu Zusheng. According the publisher’s description, the book is broken down into two major parts, “the first part is a detailed and systematic interpretation of several aspects of tea” and “the second part classifies diseases into different sorts and lists more than 180 easy to make tea treatments.”

If you’d like to combine business advice with the story of how a large tea company was founded, take a look at Mission in a Bottle: The Honest Guide to Doing Business Differently–and Succeeding, by Seth Goldman, Barry Nalebuff and Sungyoon Choi. The authors are the founders of Honest Tea, which was founded in 1998 and was racking up annual sales of $38 million just a decade later.

Last up, if you like your fiction flavored with a bit of tea you might want to keep an eye open for the forthcoming The Tea Lords, by Hella S. Haasse. A work of historical fiction by the late Dutch author, it concerns itself with the Dutch colonies in Java, where coffee, quinine and of course, tea. were among the most important commodities.

See more of William I. Lengeman’s articles here.

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