The Joy of Drinking »

Barbara Holland is the author of fourteen previous books, including Gentlemen's Blood, Hail to the Chiefs, and They Went Whistling, and has written for Smithsonian, Glamour, Playboy, the Utne Reader, Redbook, Seventeen, and the Washington Post, among many others. She lives in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains.

With characteristic elegance and delicious wit, Barbara Holland, ("a national treasure,"—Philadelphia Inquirer) celebrates the age-old act of drinking in this gimlet-eyed survey of man's relationship with booze, since the joyful discovery, ten thousand years ago, of fermented fruits and grains. In this spirited paean to alcohol, two parts cultural history, one part personal meditation, Holland takes readers on a bacchanalian romp through the Fertile Crescent, the Mermaid Tavern, Plymouth Rock, and Capitol Hill and reveals, as Faulkner famously once said, how civilization indeed begins with fermentation. Filled with tasty tidbits about distillers, bootleggers, taverns, hangovers, and Alcoholics Anonymous, The Joy of Drinking is a fascinating portrait of the world of pleasures fermented and distilled.

The New York Times - Robert Harris

And as you might guess, Holland, who has written a dozen or so previous books, has done impressive research on a subject dear to some of us writers who drink. Mentioned are Johnson and Boswell, John Donne (!), Byron, Oscar Wilde, Evelyn Waugh, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley, Eugene O Neill, Edmund Wilson, Thomas Wolfe, Hart Crane, Malcolm Lowry, Robert Lowell, John O Hara, Kingsley Amis. And, of course, Dylan Thomas, who once defined an alcoholic as someone you don t like who drinks as much as you do.

Holland has a light, winsome touch and is always funny. Here she is on Winston Churchill making a martini: he poured the gin into a pitcher and then nodded ritually at the bottle of vermouth across the room.

Contents

Civilization Begins.................................................1
The Jolly Tankard...................................................22
Gin Lane............................................................42
Pilgrims' Problems..................................................55
Many Merrie Diversions..............................................67
The March of the Drys...............................................74
Martinis, Antifreeze, and Other Forbidden Fruit.....................8
The Following Day...................................................100
"My Name Is David"..................................................109
America Repents.....................................................117
Experts and Fashionistas............................................129
Appendix A-Making Your Own..........................................141
Appendix B-Starting Your Still......................................145
Selected Bibliography...............................................149