A well-written illustrated guide to cocktails that is a must-have for bartenders and anyone who loves a quality adult...
Brady’s bartending guide serves up some classic—and tasty—recipes for mixed drinks.
Aimed at the home bartender but also useful for professionals, this cocktail guide is as entertaining and beautiful as it is helpful. In the author’s introduction, Brady asserts that “most cocktails are simply not worth drinking. Consequently, the scope of this book is limited to a highly select group of classic cocktails, most of which are 65 to well over 100 years old.” The book’s lineup of these classic cocktail recipes is divided into five chapters: “Built Cocktails,” including mint juleps and mojitos; “Stirred Cocktails,” including the trusty Manhattan and martini; “Shaken Cocktails,” including the cosmopolitan and margarita; “Cocktails with Foam,” including the whiskey sour and white lady; and “Custom-Made Cocktail Syrups,” including basic simple syrup and mint syrup. The recipes are easy to follow and result in tasty concoctions, but it’s the additional elements in this book that really separate it from the other bartending guides out there. Non-recipe chapters include “A Brief History of Cocktails” and “Guidelines for Great Cocktails,” the latter of which includes 12 tips that will elevate any bartender’s game. Beautiful photographs, a guide to cocktail measurements (what is a “dash,” anyway?), and recommended equipment for your bar are the cherries garnishing the drink. It’s this combination—useful information and beautifully designed pages—that really distinguishes this charming book from run-of-the-mill bar guides; this attractive volume will, of course, be at home behind the bar, but also on a coffee table. Brady’s guide is a winner across the board, with recipes and techniques galore, beautiful and colorful illustrative photos, and a bit of illuminating history served up along the way.
A well-written illustrated guide to cocktails that is a must-have for bartenders and anyone who loves a quality adult beverage.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2022
ISBN: 9780983939894
Page Count: 198
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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