"The mouth of a perfectly contented man is filled
with beer." That maxim, discovered on an ancient Egyptian manufacturing
papyrus, isn't as catchy as "Beer me!", but it accurately sums up the attitudes
of many cultures surveyed in Iain Gately's Drink: A Cultural History Of
Alcohol.
Still, in America alone, beer has gone from human right and potential curative
(the Puritans and the Mayflower crew fought over whether sick settlers deserved
their fair share of beer) to illegal substance and back again.
Gately has poured a
ridiculous wealth of research into Drink, which chronicles the relationship between
man and booze from approximately 8000 B.C.—when the first known alcoholic
drinks were prepared among Sumerian hunter-gatherers—to Vladimir Putin's
establishment of a Russian state-run vodka monopoly in 2005. Paired with the
exploits of champion drinkers like Benjamin Franklin and Ernest Hemingway are
diversions into the parallel history of the opposition to alcohol, from the
pageantry of British temperance meetings to modern objections to Bud Light
spokesdog Spuds MacKenzie. Of particular interest to Gately is the intersection
of drinking and politics, like Napoleon III's interest in promoting the fruits
of Bordeaux, which laid the foundation for how wine is classified today.
Drinkers have always been a fickle sort, as the makers of Zima know; California
miners switched to Mexican mescal because it was a cheaper intoxicant than
lager, and a glut of English grain caused the government to (successfully)
encourage small farmers to convert their fields into jars in the 17th century.
In a sense, Gately's
subject is his worst enemy, because even reading about the most disgusting,
death-defying bender is entertainment secondary to being on one—a
phenomenon Gately undoubtedly discovered when writing Tobacco: A Cultural History Of How An Exotic Plant Seduced
Civilization.
(Teetotalers: Your mileage may vary.) But his pesky insistence on recapping the
fundamentals of middle-school world-history surveys as a preface to discussing
a particular society's attitude toward alcohol gives each chapter a fair amount
of dead weight. Informing readers that Athens was considered the cultural
center of ancient Greece, for instance, detracts from the real treasure of Drink, the wealth of tidbits
Gately dug up. It's in the intellectual chapters, in which he examines cocktail
consumption in La Dolce Vita, or illustrates the campaign of the popular press
against London's "Gin Lanes," that the ferment of analysis and raw fact
produces the most intoxicating blend.