Iain Gately is the author of Tobacco: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization. Raise in Hong Kong, he studied law at Cambridge University and worked in the financial markets of London, where he currently lives.
"Thorough, informative, briskly readable, and witty."
-Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post
"This is a book to be read with pleasure, best sipped in leisure
like good bourbon."
-Dallas Morning News
British author Iain Gately calls alcohol the "equivocal liquid,"
and his exploration of our love-hate relationship with it is "by
turns entertaining, inspiring, sobering, informative and simply
fascinating," writes reviewer Janice Kennedy in the Ottawa Citizen.
As he did with Tobacco, his earlier cultural history, Gately offers
what amounts to nothing less than a history of human civilization.
From the archeological evidence of fermented potables in northern
China nearly 10,000 years ago to the notion that American rap
culture has been the salvation of France's champagne and cognac
industries with its taste for both pricey libations, Drink covers
it all: the colour, comedy, catastrophe and controversy. Reviewer
Kennedy concludes that "the book is bursting (or should that be
overflowing?) with scrupulously researched facts, statistics,
historical events and marvellous anecdotes, all of it just as
scrupulously acknowledged in endnotes. But the wonder of it is its
immense readability." Buy it.
- The National Post (Canada)
With the same ambitious sweep and needle-in-history's-haystack approach of his previous tome on tobacco, Gately takes on all things alcohol. From absinthe to Jay-Z's boycott of allegedly racist Cristal, from Mayan pulque to Pilsner Urquell, he covers the history and the culture of the medicinal and mind-altering product that since at least 8000 B.C. has been part of human civilization. The book's first chapters chronicle the history of fermentation and distillation from early civilization through the late Middle Ages, before the narrative's bulk gives over to alcohol's story since the colonization of the New World. Gately touches on such minutiae as the tableware and music selections onboard the expedition ships that followed Raleigh to America and an exacting chronology of laws enacted to ban the sale of alcohol to Indians. He ecumenically includes historical information from every civilized continent; yet for a book on booze, it's at first drier than straight gin, definitely for those who like their history neat. Like a good party, however, it becomes livelier as the author works in such far-flung cultural materials as the plays of Alfred Jarry and Budweiser's '80s mascot, Spuds McKenzie. In the end, Gately ranges so wide and deep that this may become a classic reference on the subject. (July) Copyright 2008 Reed Business Information.
"Thorough, informative, briskly readable, and witty."
-Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post
"This is a book to be read with pleasure, best sipped in leisure
like good bourbon."
-Dallas Morning News
British author Iain Gately calls alcohol the "equivocal liquid,"
and his exploration of our love-hate relationship with it is "by
turns entertaining, inspiring, sobering, informative and simply
fascinating," writes reviewer Janice Kennedy in the Ottawa Citizen.
As he did with Tobacco, his earlier cultural history, Gately
offers what amounts to nothing less than a history of human
civilization. From the archeological evidence of fermented potables
in northern China nearly 10,000 years ago to the notion that
American rap culture has been the salvation of France's champagne
and cognac industries with its taste for both pricey libations,
Drink covers it all: the colour, comedy, catastrophe and
controversy. Reviewer Kennedy concludes that "the book is bursting
(or should that be overflowing?) with scrupulously researched
facts, statistics, historical events and marvellous anecdotes, all
of it just as scrupulously acknowledged in endnotes. But the wonder
of it is its immense readability." Buy it.
- The National Post (Canada)
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