A rich compendium of botanical lore for cocktail lovers.
A comprehensive guide to the intersection of plants and booze.
Fine Gardening contributor Stewart (Wicked Bugs: The Louse that Conquered Napoleon's Army & Other Diabolical Insects, 2011, etc.) brings together an encyclopedia of information on 160 plants from around the world that are often used in alcoholic beverages. Her enthusiasm is evident throughout, as she brings readers into "the dazzlingly rich, complex, and delicious lives of the plants that go into all those bottles behind the bar." Classic plants like grapes, apples, corn and sugarcane are just a few of the botanicals that Stewart examines. She also studies the herbs and spices used to flavor base alcohols, as well as elderflowers, hops, roses and violets, which will alert gardeners to the potential living in the garden. Stewart rounds out her in-depth coverage with a full section on fruit, including apricots and yuzus, and nuts and seeds like almonds and walnuts. The history of fermentation and distillation, the origins of plant-based medicines, tips on growing your own plants and more than 50 cocktail recipes add multiple layers to an already vast amount of information on botanicals. Gardeners, nature lovers and mixologists will find themselves reaching frequently for this volume; the hard part will be deciding what to try next as they discover that a liquor store is really "a fantastical greenhouse, the world's most exotic botanical garden, the sort of strange and overgrown conservatory we only encounter in our dreams."
A rich compendium of botanical lore for cocktail lovers.Pub Date: March 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1616200466
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
After a session with this lyrical book, the reader will understand, too.
A capable guided tour of a landscape unlike almost any other.
Nostalgia for lost places—mostly dammed or developed or 'dozed—drives much modern nature writing. First-time author Colasurdo indulges in nostalgia aplenty, and sometimes in purplish prose, but the lost places about which she writes are gone, not through human malfeasance, but through a not-unexpected show of natural force. Spirit Lake, the venue of many of Colasurdo's memories, is located below Mount St. Helen's, or Loowit, its Native-American name, which blew its top in 1980. The resulting "dreamscape of our childhood,'' as Colasurdo calls the mountain, for years resembled the surface of the moon. But then, faster than anyone expected, life began to return to the volcanic landscape: Trees grew, flowers bloomed, and the dead lake filled anew with water, fish, and beavers. People returned, too; a hundred visitors now ascend the volcano every day. Colasurdo, writing with a solid grasp of science lightly worn, looks at volcanology and what might be called salvage ecology to account for this renaissance, noting that "the volcano had not so much deforested its foothills as rearranged the trees'' and that most plant and animal species are, all in all, a hardy and resilient lot. The author has a grand time presenting and interpreting her arguments of how the mountain works, and she's done her homework well. After much time walking its remnants, she writes, "I understood how volcanoes bloom on the Earth's crust like so many branches of scarlet paintbrush.''
After a session with this lyrical book, the reader will understand, too.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-57061-081-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Sasquatch
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1997
An uninspired argument for the natural place of hunting in human society and the human psyche. Environmental psychologist Swan (Nature as Teacher and Healer, not reviewed) has written a thorough response to those who denounce hunting as cruelty to animals. Growing up in rural Michigan, he learned the excitement and responsibilities of the hunt from the time he was old enough to handle a BB gun. Animal- rights groups who harass hunters, Swan says, should remember that hunters are frequently the staunchest supporters of conservation and wildlife management. Far from being sadists, he adds, they have experienced the moment when they hold in the sight of their gun the life that will provide their dinner; this awakes in them an awe of the delicate balances that make up the web of nature. He argues that humans are, after all, carnivorous animals, a truth that the buffers of our ``civilized'' world have enabled us to forget. In an age when inner-city children are being slaughtered by predators with AK-47s, the author finds painful irony in activists' frenzied protests against licensed hunting. Swan hurts his strong case with an undisguised contempt for his ideological opponents. Calling animal-rights activists a ``new subspecies of human,'' he never lets a rational voice from the other side balance his position, and he often strays from his subjeect into the ethical questions of vegetarianism and animal testing. He also has an unfortunate tendency to rhapsodize about nature with a hackneyed, fuzzy mysticism that makes him sound like a New Age guru. He would win more converts if he cut out some of the sermons on spirituality and stuck to his lyrical hunting tales. Swan ultimately tells too much and shows too little in his prosaic defense of the elemental necessity of hunting.
Pub Date: Nov. 24, 1994
ISBN: 0-06-251029-0
Page Count: 282
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
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