And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails

I absolutely loved this book and I am not even a big fan of history. I loved it so much I bought multiple copies and sent them to friends. Who would have thought that the development of the free world was so interconnected with booze:)

If history were always this well written, I would have been a history rather than literature major. I actually laughed out loud in a number of places, at the same time that I learned facts about 17th-21st century history and popular culture that were frequently from an intriguing perspective and always interesting. If you like rum, the recipes-through-history are a bonus. If you don't, you will still find much, much of value in this volume. Although rum is the focus, the social, political, military and historical dynamics affected by this and other liquors are the actual "plot." It is a legitimate and fascinating lens through which to view history--particularly when written by an academic who throws out the dry and dusty academic voice in favor of a learned, no-nonsense and yet often humorous one. Liberal quotations bring contemporary voices to light, while duly considered authorial commentary places them in a reasonable context. I am not a historian, but the bibliography is sufficiently substantial to assure me of grounded research and neither the tone, factual content nor voice ever seems to be stretched to fit the "drink-by-drink" historical structure. This paragraph makes it seem dry (all puns aside, LOL), but this book most assuredly is not. If you liked "Salt" or "Coal" or "Cod," you'll like this. More significantly, if you're feeling burned out on this kind of recently popular "slice" history, do *not* pass up this one. A must read for you, whether or not you like rum, and a great gift for others, particularly if they do like rum.

What a pleasure to roam the shipping lanes of history with this wry storyteller! From rum's inception, when an industrial waste (molasses) trysted with the human desire to be wasted, this spirit has led an adventurer's life. In the beginning, in a Caribbean fouled with pirates, sugar and slavery, rum's fermentation was sometimes jump-started with a bolus of manure or an animal carcass. In the end, Guatemala is turning out a 23-year-old rum that tastes like moonlit waves and rolls you for $50. In between, rum enjoyed a bizarre and frequently hilarious career involving the English Navy, an astronomical number of limes, Paul Revere, hot pokers, Newfoundland salt cod, Earnest Hemingway and Fidel Castro, and the geographically-challenged Tiki-bar phenomenon. For a surprising night-cap, rum finds its way back to... well, some place it was before, which I also found surprising. To my even-further surprise, the ten cocktails mentioned in the subtitle really do chart the course of rum's New World bender. The additional cocktails in the appendix have me scribbling a shopping list: Jamaican dark, a Cuban light, and a Barbados medium, seventy-five limes, falernum, Thai basil, a bottle of that $50 Zacapa...

If you, like me, feel your eyelids droop at the words "history book," you, like me, are probably remembering the tepid tomes the nuns made you read in seventh grade. Well, this is NOT your grade-school teacher's history book. This is a lively, slightly drunken account that begins with the madness and mayhem that accompanied the settling of the New World, and from there roams far and wide through many lives and times. And it goes down real smooooth. It's full of stories, stories, stories, and boy, can this guy WRITE. Thank you, Wayne Curtis, for making me love history again.