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(More customer reviews)I am not so much a sucker for history books as I am a sucker for very focused, almsot gimmicky, history books. Andrew Carr's _Drink: A Social History of America_ is a similarly gimmicky history book that I (pun coming) ate and drank up furiously, and Wayne Curtis has provided an equally capturing read with _And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails_.
This book comes from the level perspective of a connoseur of rum, one who enjoys the depth of the drink, which includes the history of it and the stories behind it. Besides the unsolveable questions of who ever first invented something like the mai tai or who even first made the first batch of the molasses-based spirit, Wayne Curtis delves through a liquor that has been both a savior and a demon for America.
And that is the main point of this book that I truly treasure--for nowadays, rum is considered a very tropical drink, something more at home in a pina colada or a tiki bar than something attached to the dirty farmland of the New World, but Curtis reattaches rum to its colonial identity and heritage, along with solid associations with pirates and seafarers. Rather than being a light, sit-back-on-the-beach drink, Curtis attaches rum back to flogging and piracy and the Revolutionary War. And he does this in each chapter through identifying a particular way of serving rum (the mojito, the flip, or just plain grog) to examine how that drink played its role in history. Though rum is a liquor that can take many, many forms, Curtis looks at how all spirits were lumped into the term 'rum' for Prohibition, and also how rum came into grace, then fell out of it, and almost seemed to fall off the face of the Earth altogether, only to soar back, though in a new way that Curtis bashes thoroughly in the final chapter, which examines the industrialization of rum.
This is a very fascinating and readable book that is filled with humor and appropiate snobbery for a liquor that may not have the high rep of things like cognac and scotch, but certainly has the street cred to kick any other liquor's rear.
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