A toper’s pleasure, though perhaps it should come with a warning label.
Gin and tonic? Gin rickey? Gin gimlet? Stop being so prissy: In this lively history, Barnett (Medical London, 2008, etc.) notes that the way to drink gin is neat, “with perhaps an occasional dash of bitters to soften the rough edge of pot-still spirit.”
You don’t have to be British to like gin—indeed, writes the author, most of the output of the Tanqueray plant, now located in Scotland, is sent to the United States. However, though invented in its more-or-less modern form in Holland (or perhaps Belgium), gin is a very British thing to drink. Readers of Robert Hughes’ book The Fatal Shore (1986) may remember its opening gin-soaked pages, public drunkenness being one cause for so many Cockneys to be sent packing to the Antipodes. Londoner Barnett pays homage to Hogarthian visions of the streets of the British capital, but he’s as much interested in the chemistry of the sauce as he is in its (mostly deleterious) social effects. Accordingly, he offers a kind of prehistory of gin that takes us through cultures that have found interesting things to do with juniper, including the Finns and their sahti, “a beer flavored with juniper berries instead of hops, and filtered through juniper twigs,” and the ancient Romans, whose physicians counseled applying crushed juniper berries to the genitals in order to chase away unwanted offspring. Barnett charts the rising and falling fortunes of gin, from poor man’s swill to retro-lounge hipster’s beverage of choice, and he closes with a personal and highly provisional catalog of favorite gins, from stalwarts such as Beefeater to more bespoke lines such as Wees Distillery Very Old Geneva and the British-Icelandic hybrid Martin Miller’s Westbourne Strength Gin.
A toper’s pleasure, though perhaps it should come with a warning label.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2043-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2012
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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