Books on Alcohol

These books on booze deserve a toast, says Daniel Okrent


1. The Alcoholic Republic. (1979). W.J. Rorabaugh. Oxford.

This excavation of the most drink-sodden era in U.S. history (1790-1840) is as damning as it is enlightening. At a time of easy access (there were 14,000 American distilleries by 1810), rough frontier mores and poor water quality, liquor seeped into every corner of national life, writes W.J. Rorabaugh. Americans "drank at home and abroad, alone and together, at work and at play, in fun and in earnest. They drank from the crack of dawn to the crack of dawn." If you wish to understand the temperance movement's nobler impulses—that is, those that were untouched by the xenophobia and political cynicism that later drove the campaign— you might start here.

2. Domesticating Drink. (1998). Catherine Gilbert Murdock. Johns Hopkins.

Despite her subtitle, "Women, Men, and Alcohol in America, 1870-1940," Catherine Gilbert Murdock's primary subjects are female and her perspective decidedly feminist. But by focusing on women and drink—territory previously unexplored by scholars of her ability—she is able to tease out some of the puzzling and persistent anomalies and contradictions in American attitudes toward booze: women soldiers of the temperance movement co-existing with matrons who chugged Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound (20.6% alcohol!) to alleviate their "female complaints"; the instant acceptance of women into the speakeasy, after they had been barred for decades from the saloon; and the absolutely decisive role of women in bringing about Prohibition's repeal, just they had been critical to its creation.

3. Noble Experiments.  "Judge Jr."  John Day, 1930

This pocket-size oddity—chiefly a compendium of novel cocktail recipes— tells you how impotent Prohibition had become during its waning years, at least in the big cities and other places where the wish to obey the law ran a distant second to the wish to imbibe. Published three years before the arrival of Repeal, "Noble Experiments" (the title was taken from Herbert Hoover's characterization of Prohibition) wasn't about the appreciation of fine liquors and wines. A typical concoction (gin, brandy, apricot brandy, lime juice) was known as "The Bridge Table," the pseudonymous author tells us, "because 8after a few of these your legs will fold up." Among those who contributed recipes were journalist Heywood Broun, actor Roland Young and impresario Florenz Ziegfeld; among those who declined was the usually ombibulous H.L. Mencken, who in a rare moment of moderation said he'd rather make the argument for wine and beer.

4. The Speakeasies of 1932. (1932). Al Hirschfeld and Gordon Kahn. Dutton.

More than a decade before he began to insinuate his daughter's name, Nina, into his grand caricatures of entertainment figures and other celebrities, the 29-year-old Al Hirschfeld devoted a good chunk of a year to prowling some of the 32,000 speakeasies tucked into every corner of New York. ("This may be the best damned researched book ever," he wrote in a preface to the 2003 edition, when he was 99.) Ranging from Bowery dives to the "all marble and gold" Bath Club on West 53rd Street, where the entertainment was chamber music, Hirschfeld produced a portrait of speakeasy life infinitely more reliable than the distorted renderings concocted for film and television.

5. Martini, Straight Up. (1998). Lowell Edmunds Johns Hopkins.

In the midst of his distinguished career as a classicist, Lowell Edmunds paused to focus his critical talents on a cultural artifact packed with just as much meaning as a Minoan terracotta or an Ionic capital. Originally published in 1981 as "The Silver Bullet: The Martini in American Civilization," Edmunds's book finds seven meanings in the martini (among them: "The Martini Is Optimistic, Not Pessimistic," "The Martini Is the Drink of Adults, Not of Children") and four ambiguities ("The Martini Is Sensitive—The Martini Is Tough"). He's not quite the cocktail snob that I am—he is willing to consider that a martini can be made from vodka—but one suspects that Edmunds does prefer his bullets straight up and very dry.

— Mr. Okrent is the author of "Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition." He writes a monthly book-review column for Fortune.Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page W8

Four seasons in Rome

Four seasons in Rome: on twins, insomnia, and the biggest funeral in the history of the world. (2007). Anthony Doerr. New York: Scribner.

How I wanted to like this book; o, how I wanted. I first came across it many moons ago, and took it out of Peninsula Library. Started to read it, I felt disturbed by the style used, but persevered.And persevered. But I could not like it. And, as Mrs. Delahunty might have said, one can not help not liking a book. And I don't like this one. So I'm stopping at page 96. I have others book to read, others I'm reading (Duke Ellington's America, by Harvey G. Cohen; Napoleon Bonaparte: a life, by Alan Schom (struggling to end it); Flotsametrics and the floating world, Curtis Ebbesmeyer; which lead me to The mysterious history of Columbus : an exploration of the man, the myth, the legacy, by John Noble Wilford), and want to read (In search of Nella Larsen : a biography of the color line, by George Hutchinson; and, perhaps, Why this world : a biography of Clarice Lispector, byBenjamin Moser.).

Dancing with Cuba

Picked up, looks interesting; another time.

The man who invented Fidel

DePalma, Anthony. (2006). The man who invented Fidel: Cuba, Castro, and Herbert L. Matthews of The New York times.New York: Public Affairs.

Excellent work. Enjoyed reading immensely. DePalma debunks myths on both sides of the equation, analyzes Matthews's career and role, and does not spare the Times in his judgment. This is a book that should be widely known and read, but it is far too serious and challenging to be such. Alas, the world subsists on bad books and myths.

One person mentioned prominently was a journalist resident in Cuba before Matthews arrived, Ruby Hart Phillips. She had contacts everywhere, the Batista government included, and did little foot work to research her stories. Needless to say, she disliked and resented Matthews and his work. She went by the name of R. Hart Phillips to fight sexism.

She wrote two books on Cuba: Cuba, island of paradox (1959) and The Cuban dilemma.(1963).

Samples of DePalma's words:

"Matthews was a scholar with a deadline, an intellectual with printer's ink on his hands and a soldier's tolerance for danger in his heart." p.19

"In a time of misconceptions and lies, the truth itself became malleable. Both the accusers and the accused were willing to believe that image mattered more than reality. Policy was being misshaped by perception, while perceptions were distorted by emotions. Both government and journalism were under tremendous pressures at this critical moment, and both would be forced to change in significant ways in their relationship to one another." p.229

If it's Tuesday, this must be Belgium

If it's Tuesday, this must be Belgium

A patron called looking for soundtrack to film (which includes Donovan).

Gjon Mili : photographs & recollections

He directed the short "Swinging the Blues" that opens with shot of Prez's porkpie hat. Interesting book.

Messiah?

Heilman, Samuel C. (2010). The Rebbe: the life and afterlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Dressed in a white straw hat, tan chinos and a blue shirt, Samuel Heilman, the co-author of a new book about Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, stood at the rebbe’s grave site among scores of pilgrims — a vanguard of the thousands expected to visit on Tuesday, in the Jewish calendar the 16th anniversary of his death — who arrived at a Queens cemetery a few days early to commune with their beloved leader.

“It is very holy,” Mr. Heilman said outside the open-air mausoleum, or ohel, that contains the graves of the rebbe and his father-in-law and predecessor, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn. Hasidim believe that the spirit of a great sage remains after death, and many Lubavitchers think the rebbe is not only a sage, but also the messiah.

Michael Falco for The New York Times

Lubavitchers at the Queens grave site of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson.

Triangle in the Sky

The Flatiron: the New York landmark and the incomparable city that arose with it. Alice Sparberg Alexiou. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2010.

Yalta: the price of peace. (2010). Plokhy, Serhii 
New York: Viking .


Various links include an event at the Woodrow Wilson Center, a segment on BookTV,

No Reservations, No Prisoners

Bourdain, Anthony. (2010). Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook. Ecco: New York


The black leather jacket and earring are gone. On the cover of Anthony Bourdain's "Medium Raw," he is dressed in dark suit and tie, the tie a little loose around the neck, as if he is not quite at ease in it. Seated at a beaten-up wooden table strewn with carving implements, the former chef is testing the sharpness of a kitchen knife against his middle finger. Who, you wonder, will he stick the knife in this time?

The leather jacket and earring have been replaced by placed products; he flashes a Chase Platinum, no, Saphire, card. Everyone grows up eventually, I suppose. Bourdain has become trite.

"Medium Raw" mixes personal memoir with travelogues and ruminations on such matters as the degradation of the American hamburger, the dumbing down of the Food Network, the tedium of multicourse tasting menus and the rise of food gurus such as David Chang ("the most important chef in America today"), whose 12-seat restaurant Momofuku Ko on New York's Lower East Side requires you to log onto its website at precisely the right moment six days in advance to book a place.

Nothing is that important.


The author is still a bit of a kid himself, or at least a brat, like the one who shoots off his mouth in class, daring to say out loud what others may secretly have been thinking. He hates vegetarians, raw-food enthusiasts and celebrity chefs' product endorsements.

Is that a form of self-loathing? Or does he consider his own endorsement subtle enough to be refined and excused? Plu-eez.

The news last year about a deadly strain of E.coli in hamburgers sends Mr. Bourdain, an unabashed carnivore, into a paroxysm. The meat was sold by the food giant Cargill, "the largest private company in America. A hundred and sixteen billion dollars in revenue a year," he rails, yet the company tried to "save a few cents on their low-end burgers" by using meat scraps that had been treated with ammonia to kill bacteria. The words "meat" and "treated with ammonia," he says, should never appear in the same sentence "unless you're talking about surreptitiously disposing of a corpse.

A very valid and accurate point. Vintage Bourdain. As is this:

Mr. Bourdain is a vivid, bawdy and often foul-mouthed writer. He thrills in the attack, but he is also an enthusiast who writes well about things he holds dear. His detailed reporting on the backroom lives of restaurant employees is terrific. One of the most moving parts of the book is a chapter on a Dominican, Justo Thomas, who has spent the past six years in a tiny room below the kitchen of Le Bernardin in New York, cleaning 700 pounds of fish a day and cutting it into perfectly uniform portions. Breaking rules of the trade, Mr. Bourdain takes him to lunch in the dining room, where Mr. Thomas for the first time gets to taste the fish he has prepared.

No one else does that.

"At the end of the day, would a good and useful criterion for evaluating a meal be 'Was it fun?' "

The end of the day? Ach, rescue me from clichés!


As a chef, Mr. Bourdain has never been on a par with his heroes, and he readily admits to possessing only "middling" kitchen skills. But he loves to cook and feels strongly that everyone should learn at least the basics. "I have long believed that it is only right and appropriate that before one sleeps with someone, one should be able—if called upon to do so—to make a proper omelet in the morning."

Lady Q

Went looking for Paul Quinichette,by googling Lady Q, and wound up with this book as the first result: Lady Q : the rise and fall of a Latin queen / Reymundo Sanchez and Sonia Rodriguez.

Sjöwall and Wahlöö

A Peninsula Library patron told me he was looking for books on CD by these Swedish authors, back some weeks ago. He was in today, and thanked me profusely for enlightening him on accessing the OPAC online. Nice to get such feedback.

Hunted : a true story of survival

Came across this book whilst weeding 796.5 books (Athletic & outdoor sports & games). Looks interesting.

What becomes: stories

Well reviewed in Kirkus; that should be enough to spark the curiousity. Reviewed in NYT Sunday 23 May.

Language

A patron called to reserve these two books:
    Hitch-22 : A Political Memoir : Hitchens, Christopher
    Globish : how the English language became the world's language McCrum, Robert.

420.9 M
English language -- History.
English language -- Globalization

 B Hitchens

Read More Than Respected

The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham
by Selina Hastings
Random House, 626 pages, $35

Over the course of a literary career that spanned an astonishing eight decades, Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) wrote some of the 20th century's best-loved novels (e.g., "Of Human Bondage"), a cluster of hit plays in London's West End ("The Constant Wife"), ground-breaking travel books ("The Gentleman in the Parlour," about Southeast Asia), an eloquent intellectual memoir ("The Summing Up"), and some of the finest short stories in the English language ("The Letter," "Rain," "The Outstation"). Such was his success as a writer that, in his later years, he became almost as well known for his opulent manner of living as for his work.

 The book is given a generally positive review.


 In "The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham," Ms. Hastings draws on thorough research and recently released documents to trace Maugham's busy life—his stormy marriage, his attentiveness to his daughter, Liza, his world-wide travels, his literary quarrels, his generosity to younger writers, his often furtive homosexuality—but she also pays a great deal of attention to his literary output, where the emphasis belongs. It irked Maugham, she says, that Bloomsbury and other highbrow literary circles tended to dismiss him or ignore him altogether.
"As much as his middlebrow reputation," Ms. Hastings writes, "it was his success, and the affluence that came with that success, that in the eyes of Bloomsbury placed him beyond the pale." Maugham himself characterized his position on more than one occasion: "I know just where I stand, in the very front row of the second rate." Ms. Hastings ranks Maugham rather higher than that.

Battle of Ideas

Running Commentary
By Benjamin Balint
(PublicAffairs, 290 pages, $26.95)

no institution in the realm of ideas has contributed more to highlighting such shared circumstances [of Israel and the US] than Commentary magazine, founded in 1945 by the American Jewish Committee. Of course, as Benjamin Balint reminds us in "Running Commentary," his acutely perceptive account of the magazine's history, Commentary's concerns have ranged far beyond its keynote focus on the America-Israel relationship

The magazine's core founding community of writers—among them, Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Irving Howe and Alfred Kazin—came to its pages having experimented with Marxism and ambivalent about their Jewishness. If their vestigial leftist orientation inclined them to raise their eyebrows at America's middle-class culture, their Jewishness—their growing recognition that, in the U.S., Jews could succeed and gain acceptance in a way that they had never done in Europe—brought them, over time, to a deep love of America. And if their Jewishness fostered an initial hesitancy toward Israel's birth in 1948—for contributors such as Hannah Arendt, Nazism had cast a pall on all nationalisms—their leftist stance inclined them to welcome a communal, kibbutz-centered state run by a European-style labor party. 

Forced to choose between its lingering leftist orientation and an undiluted pro-Americanism, the magazine chose America. Thus it was that Commentary came to its twin solidarities: with Israel, with America.
 

As Mr. Balint's book shows so vividly, Commentary made—and continues to make—an invaluable contribution to the politics and culture of our time. All one could ask is that it return more often to its roots and give us a little more of that old-time religion.

The real Fidel

Coltman, Leycester. (2003). The real Fidel Castro. foreword by Julia E. Sweig.
New Haven : Yale University Press.

Mentioned by Anthony DePalma in his book, The man who invented Fidel (about Herbert Matthews).