Review by Choice Review
Drink is a sprightly, well-informed, and quarrelsome book filled with fascinating detail, interpretative insights, and the author's self-confident judgments on everything and everybody. It is both a popular history of alcoholic drink in the US and an exploration from a British perspective of American society and the American character, approached through the doorway of drinking practices. It provides scholars with a bibliographic essay and 46 pages of chapter references but no footnote citations. Surprisingly for a popular history, it devotes more pages to an index than to illustrations. Barr is an outspoken champion of social drinking, especially wine at meals. He spares little sympathy for old-time temperance reformers, most new-time drink therapists, or what he considers mindless drink-bashing. Nor does he like American beer. Organized more or less thematically and written discursively, his book finds room for discussion of iced tea, a chapter entitled "Drink and Sex," and much contemporary commentary and controversy. A few years earlier Barr published a different book with the same title (Drink, 1995) that focused on Britain. All levels. D. M. Fahey; Miami University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
'Twas Bobbie Burns who celebrated the value of "see[ing] ourselves as others see us." Americans have alternately accepted and resisted assessments by outside observers from Tocqueville to the present. Barr writes for London's Sunday Times and authored a social history of alcohol use in Great Britain as well as Wine Snobbery (1992). Here, he surveys U.S. history through the lens of a liquor bottle, drawing thoughtful insights as well as conclusions sure to generate controversy. Barr emphasizes alcohol's symbolic importance: "For colonists, it . . . assert[ed] independence; for warring states . . . local identity or national unity; for democrats, equality; for immigrants, identity; for women, emancipation; for the wealthy, status; for the country as a whole, civilization." Yet unlike Europeans, Americans have tended to extremes, binging and then prohibiting liquor, rejecting moderate indulgence (common in other countries) at both extremes. In tracing American attitudes and behavior over nearly four centuries, Barr challenges much current conventional wisdom and offers surprising takes on many aspects of U.S. history. --Mary Carroll
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The main point of this cheerful mixture of polemic and cultural history is that Americans are both bad drunks and bad tee-totalers. London Sunday Times journalist Barr (Wine Snobbery, a social history of drink in Great Britain) makes entertaining work of tracing how alcohol has been intertwined with American history. Ever since European immigrants got Native Americans drunk in order to fleece them of their land and goods, booze has been a lubricant of American expansion and growth. During the American Revolution, alcohol became a symbol of independence (thanks to British attempts to tax molasses and Madeira), and rebels plotted resistance to the crown in New England taverns. Prohibition, in Barr's view, reflected a wider cultural conflict in which native-born WASPs attacked immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, viewing their custom of drinking at meals as symptomatic of sloth. "In its view of liquor, America is out of step with the rest of the Western world," chides Barr, arguing that Americans have never outgrown their tendency to oscillate between binge drinking and abstinence, between debauch and ineffectual puritanism. Barr further argues that alcoholism is not a disease but a failure of personality. And while he acknowledges that strict law enforcement and campaigns like Mothers Against Drunk Drivers have contributed to a decline in drunk-driving auto accidents, he opposes setting the minimum drinking age at 21. While his arguments may nettle or infuriate, his opinionated chronicle is briskly engaging and full of wondrous lore on Americans' eating and drinking habits. Eight-pages of b&w photos. QPB selection. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Barr employs the fields of history, cultural anthropology, pharmacology, religion, economics, nutrition, law, technology, and psychology in his consideration of alcohol consumption in the United States. A Sunday Times writer in London, Barr (Wine Snobbery: An Expos, S. & S., 1992. o.p.) brings a unique perspective and biting satirical commentary to his work. His approach is thematic rather than narrative, with chapters on conflicting attitudes toward drink and drugs, the Americanization of European drinking habits, the utter failure of governmental authorities to control alcohol traffic effectively, and the many vogues of social drinking from the 19th-century workingman's saloon to today's yuppie clubs. Barr discounts the notion that alcoholism is a disease. He chides Alcoholics Anonymous for its outmoded precepts of uplift and teetotalism and criticizes Mothers Against Drunk Drivers for pursuing the bogus issues of a minimum driving age and a ridiculously low blood alcohol content standard. While the book is thought-provoking and impressively researched, Barr's polemical digressions are too numerous and too long, his proffered solutions to America's problems unconvincing or downright "over the top," and his lack of an overarching historical narrative makes for an uneven and laborious read. Recommended for larger public and academic libraries.ÄJohn Carver Edwards, Univ. of Georgia Libs., Athens (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An exploration of American drinking habits through time from a British scholar of booze. Barr (Wine Snobbery, 1992), a journalist for the London Sunday Times, offers a social history of drink in America, one organized by theme rather than by strict chronology. Throughout, one suspects that Barr never met a drink he didn't like (at least, that is, as a subject of inquiry), and he defends alcohol as ``a means of sharing, of cementing friendship, of defining status, of establishing loyalty, of entering adulthood, of declaring freedom.'' Of sclerotic livers and broken homes he has little to say, preferring instead to puzzle over Americans' puritanical attitudes toward such things as a lunchtime mug or two of brew'a good source of nutrition, he insists'and our insistence on keeping minors away from the Ripple. Supporters of MADD won't much like Barr's sensible yet controversial discussion of the flaws of lowering the acceptable blood-alcohol content of drivers, which, he says, will lead only to the creation of a whole new class of lawbreakers and thereby assure that ``drink-driving laws will lose credibility''; they will also frown on Barr's view that a little alcohol every now and then is a good stress-reliever for pregnant women. But collectors of trivia will doubtless admire Barr's talent for ferreting out oddments of alcohol-related history, such as the English penchant for drinking beer in the place of water (the latter scorned in the class-conscious homeland, Barr writes, because it was free) and the connection between anti-German sentiment in WWI and the establishment of Prohibition. Barr might have done better to write more such history, thus living up to his book's subtitle, and to spend less time numbering the virtues of John Barleycorn in the face of alcohol's critics. All in all, Barr's book makes for good bathroom reading for the family tosspot'and for good talk-show fodder. (b&w photos, not seen), (QPB selection)
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
