Through the prism of ten distinctive rum cocktails, dating from the mid-17th century to the present day, this text tells the history of North America and the Caribbean.

Reviews

Like a great barroom raconteur, the author of this engaging treatise regales his audience with piquant opinions, colorful trivia, lush rhetorical turns ("[t]he first taste washes over me and brings to mind the scene in Wizard of Oz in which the black-and-white world suddenly bursts into color") and an exalted, occasionally inflated, sense of liquor's place in the greater scheme of things. A travel writer and contributing editor to Preservation, Curtis follows rum's checkered 400-year career through various incarnations, from the cheap, caustic "kill-devil" that fortified 17th-century pirates (Blackbeard was said to enjoy a glass of flaming rum mixed with gunpowder) to today's mojitos, made from palatable, if bland, mass market rums. His profiles of rum-based cocktails (with an all-important appendix of recipes) serve as starting points for excursions on such topics as slavery in the West Indies, the temperance movement, Ernest Hemingway's epic daiquiri binges and the rise and fall of the tiki bar. Curtis's grander pronouncements ("Rum embodies America's laissez-faire attitude: It is whatever it wants to be") are true only in the groggiest sense, but readers who come along on this charming barhop through cultural history will toast them nonetheless. (July) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Toasts to "And a Bottle of Rum"

""And a Bottle of Rum" is a fascinating tale of cultural metamorphosis, tracing rum's remarkable journey from colonial rotgut to SoHo cocktail. A book with as many revelations about American history as about this archetypally American drink." --Jack Turner, author of "Spice: The History of a Temptation "

"History never tasted so good. What Herbert Asbury did for the gangs of New York, Wayne Curtis does for rum: The profiteers who traded it, the pirates who raided it, the underclass who guzzled it, the mixologists who exalted it, and the corporations who homogenized it--Curtis tells their tale with style and sweep in a tour de force of social history, urban anthropology, and cocktail 'alcohology.' A delight from first sip to last." --Jeff Berry, author of "Beachbum Berry's Grog Log", "Intoxica!", and "Taboo Table"

""And a Bottle of Rum" reveals the facts behind rum's colorful history while telling a great story of rebellion and rumbustion!" --Dale DeGroff, author of "The Craft of the Cocktail "

"Wayne Curtis breaks fascinating new ground in this very palatable history of the world-through-rum-colored glasses. The writing shows what makes modern journalism so great: clean, succinct, inclusive smoothness--not unlike great rum--and Curtis is a virtuoso at it." --Ted "Dr. Cocktail" Haigh, author of "Vintage Spirits""and""Forgotten Cocktails"


"From the Hardcover edition."