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 frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.
An experimental, illustrated essay collection that questions neurotypical definitions of what is normal.
From a young age, writer and comedian Myers has been different. In addition to coping with obsessive compulsive disorder and panic attacks, she struggled to read basic social cues. During a round of seven minutes in heaven—a game in which two players spend seven minutes in a closet and are expected to kiss—Myers misread the romantic advances of her best friend and longtime crush, Marley. In Paris, she accidentally invited a sex worker to join her friends for “board games and beer,” thinking he was simply a random stranger who happened to be hitting on her. In community college, a stranger’s request for a pen spiraled her into a panic attack but resulted in a tentative friendship. When the author moved to Australia, she began taking notes on her colleagues in an effort to know them better. As the author says to her co-worker, Tabitha, “there are unspoken social contracts within a workplace that—by some miracle—everyone else already understands, and I don’t….When things Go Without Saying, they Never Get Said, and sometimes people need you to Say Those Things So They Understand What The Hell Is Going On.” At its best, Myers’ prose is vulnerable and humorous, capturing characterization in small but consequential life moments, and her illustrations beautifully complement the text. Unfortunately, the author’s tendency toward unnecessary capitalization and experimental forms is often unsuccessful, breaking the book’s otherwise steady rhythm.
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063381308
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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