→ November 24, 2009
→ By

And a Bottle of Rum.

Wayne Curtis tries to downplay the ambitions set in the title of his book And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails, implying that he’s not going to credit human existence or history to rum the way other authors have to cod or salt or other mundane foodstuffs. That’s all to the good in my opinion, as he sticks mostly to the history of rum and various people and products associated with its rise from “the distilled essence of industrial waste” to a top-shelf liquor commanding premium prices for aged varieties as you might pay for whiskey or brandy. (It’s also available on iBooks.)

Rum is, of course, distilled from molasses (or, rarely, sugar cane juice), which was originally discarded by plantation owners as the unwanted, unsaleable waste product of sugar production and refining. It gained popularity among sailors, even becoming part of a daily grog ration for members of the Royal Navy (a practice that was only discontinued in 1970), and then became the main liquor in colonial America, first as an import from the Caribbean and later as a homemade product, playing a role along the way in the Sugar and Stamp Acts. (Curtis also attempts to dispel the myth of the triangle trade, with a few references, saying that there’s no evidence any ship actually sailed those three legs or that the trade was as simple as the middle-school story indicates.) Rum faded from view in the U.S. only to regain popularity during and after Prohibition through Cuba tourism, the song “Rum and Coca-Cola,” and the rise of the tiki bar. It is a tumultuous history with plenty of associations with major world events, even if rum itself wasn’t always the cause of them.

Along the way, Curtis provides digressions about the real Captain Morgan and his namesake rum (which wasn’t always spiced), the American temperance movement against “demon rum” even though rum was rarely consumed at the time, the history of the mai tai and the tiki bar trend, Coca-Cola (and the Andrews Sisters’ song about the two), and Paul Revere’s ride with its possibly-apocryphal stop for a dram of rum. He weaves these stories into ten chapters, each covering a specific drink, including planter’s punch, the daiquiri – not the frozen sickly-sweet concoction, but the original rum-lime-sugar-crushed ice beverage that was the libation of choice of Ernest Hemingway – and the mojito. To his credit, he has proper scorn for flavored rums, pina coladas, and Coca-Cola, since all of the three take the focus of the drink off rum by inserting a dominant alternate flavor.*

*Curtis hits on a distinction I’ve been thinking about between cocktails and mixed drinks. If you read about the history of alcoholic drinks, you’ll come across two kinds – those that try to enhance the flavor of the central liquor or push it to the front of the drink, and those that cover it up because the liquor is of low quality or because the drinker can’t abide the taste of alcohol. The former group, what I think of as cocktails, comprised drinks that were seen as masculine, like you might find a Bertie Wooster drinking at the club, while the latter, simply mixed drinks, were seen as either girly or just déclassé. Curtis even mentions the rise of vodka, a liquor devoid of character and nearly devoid of taste, and its rise as younger male drinkers in the 1950s refused to acquire the taste for strong drink. A true daiquiri remains an acceptable drink in this dichotomy, as the rum is the star ingredient with the rum and sugar as supporting players. A pina colada isn’t, as Curtis explains, because “pineapple and coconut are the linebackers of the taste world,” obliterating any indication that there’s rum in the beverage. A dark-and-stormy (dark rum and ginger beer) works because ginger and rum are complementary flavors, much like mushrooms and onions or haricots verts and almonds, but a Cuba Libre doesn’t work because it’s just a Coke with a higher proof content. I’m not quite sure how a mai tai passes muster with Curtis – I think that’s only an acceptable drink if you’re on a tropical island, and even so, there are likely better options – but in general he’s pretty consistent.

Curtis also includes recipes for modern drinks as well as brief recipes for ten classic (or just old) drinks that lead into the ten chapters. One of them, just called “punch,” looked familiar, and after making it I realized it’s the drink called “planter’s punch” in Bermuda, where my wife and I honeymooned and to which we returned for our fifth and tenth anniversaries. It’s strong and the predominant flavor is rum (Gosling’s Black Seal in Bermuda), and while you can garnish it with all manner of garbage, at its heart it’s a daiquiri with some water and maybe a pinch of nutmeg, the latter a nod to the classic punches of Britain. And it’s very easy to assemble:

Juice half a lime into a glass. Add one tablespoon of sugar, simple syrup, or agave nectar; 1 1/2 ounces of rum; and two ounces of water. Mix well and add ice.

The end of the book has a brief selection listing Curtis’ favorite rums from a cross-section of countries and multiple price ranges. I found most of them at a nearby liquor store (the one at Fresh Pond next to Whole Foods, for those of you who live around here). They’re sipping rums rather than mixing rums, for more serious drinkers than myself.

Next up: Booth Tarkington’s 1921 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Alice Adams.

Filed Under: Food, Nonfiction Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
→ September 12, 2008
→ By

Taking on the Trust.

There is no one left: none but all of us … The public is the people. We forget that we all are the people; that while each of us in his group can shove off on the rest of the bill of today, the debt is only postponed. The rest of us are passing it on back to us. We have to pay in the end, every one of us. And in the end the sum total of the debt will be our liberty. – Ida Tarbell, The History of the Standard Oil Company

Taking on the Trust: The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller is Steve Weinberg’s short biography of Tarbell, perhaps the first true investigative journalist in American history and one of the original muckrakers, set off against snippets of the biography of Rockefeller. It’s a good read, but it’s not the story of the battle between these two individuals, who in fact, only met once and had no direct contact even as Tarbell was laying bare the unethical practices of Standard Oil.

Tarbell’s magnum opus was the book quoted up top, an 800-page tome first published in installments in McClure’s magazine, which at the time was an intellectual rag that combined serious (if muckraking) journalism with pieces of short fiction. Tarbell’s father had been involved in the western Pennsylvania oil boom, but also saw his fortunes derailed by the monopolistic practices of Rockefeller’s firm. Weinberg presents the thesis that Tarbell’s drive to expose Rockefeller’s dirty pool, although her earlier work indicates a passion for reformist journalism, with Standard Oil as a likely target of any dogged reporter of the time. What set Tarbell apart was her willingness to work to unearth new sources, including first-person accounts that had not previously come to light, but also documents and letters that other journalists had not bothered to find. She made great use of court documents and filings from the small towns where Standard Oil set up shop, often via shell companies, and identified people who’d had contact with Rockefeller or his minions during Standard Oil’s rise to domination.

Unfortunately, we don’t get much on the direct impact of Tarbell’s book, which only merits a chapter and a half towards the end of Taking on the Trust. Standard Oil was broken up via court ruling a few years afterward, but how direct is the link between Tarbell’s work and that legal decision? And how did Tarbell’s groundbreaking efforts affect the world of journalism afterwards? I imagine that later investigative reporters would have given her at least some credit either for directly inspiring them or for opening doors through which they could walk, but Taking comes to a fairly abrupt end once the narrative reaches the breakup.

I may post something over the weekend, but I’ll be on vacation from Sunday to Saturday and probably won’t post anything next week. I’ll keep an eye on the comments, as always.

Filed Under: Nonfiction Tagged With: , , , ,
→ October 22, 2007
→ By

Top 25 non-fiction books.

Since this is probably going to be my lone post of the week, I figured it should be a long one. I started out planning to offer a list of the ten best nonfiction books I’ve read, and then found I’d written down thirty titles. I trimmed a few and settled on twenty-five. I’ve omitted self-help/instruction books (like books on cooking) and stuck to more serious topics, although some are lightly treated.

25. Seabiscuit, by Laura Hillenbrand. Heard the movie was terrible, which is a shame because the book was great. It’s a classic underdog story – horse thought to be too small, jockey blind in one eye, trainer with unorthodox methods, and so on – with Seabiscuit’s rise punctuated by several high moments and an almost too-good-to-be-true shot at redemption when he gets one last chance to win the race that has always eluded him.

24. The Catholic Church: A Short History, by Hans Küng. I’ll admit that this book may have a narrow appeal, but I think it’s a solid read even for those with no direct interest in the Catholic Church. Küng is the Church’s greatest internal critic, a Catholic priest and theologian who underwent an excommunication proceeding for his teachings. He rejects or questions several doctrines of the mundane Church, pointing out that such concepts as papal infallibility and the celibacy requirement for clergy are man-made, not divinely granted. The Catholic Church serves as a summary of many of his major works to date within the context of a Catholic’s history of the Church itself, dating back to its early days as a small-c catholic church hewing much more closely to the teachings of Christ than the bloated and often corrupt bureaucracy we see today.

23. The Prize Game, by Donald Petrie. A bit short and a bit slow, The Prize Game still has a fascinating and improbable story at its core: Piracy was once a government-sanctioned business with clear rules of engagement. Captured ships were known as “prizes” and there were strict guidelines for how captured cargo and sailors were to be treated. This style of privateering was all but ended after 1815, although the book does go briefly into privateering during the U.S. Civil War. If you’ve read any Patrick O’Brian books or perhaps played the Sid Meier game Pirates!, this book’s right up your alley.

22. The Invention of Clouds, by Richard Hamblyn. Reviewed briefly here. Hamblyn tells an interesting story about the amateur meteorologist who came up with the system of nomenclature and descriptions for clouds that is still more or less in use today. The only hitch here is that there wasn’t a lot of drama in the book – not that Hamblyn should have made any up – so the book just sort of flows along without the tension that tends to drive successful history of science books forward. There are some interesting asides, and it’s amazing to think that there was a time when science presentations to the public resulted in packed houses.

21. Kitchen Confidential, by Anthony Bourdain. Hilarious and cutting and explosive in its revelations of kitchen culture, Kitchen Confidential will make you think twice when deciding where to eat when eating out. And I would hope that it would teach all of you to head in the other direction when you see a sign that says “Discount Sushi.”

20. Catch Me If You Can, by Frank Abagnale. The movie sucked, but the book was great, and it’ll make you wonder why the movie’s producers felt the need to alter anything given how outrageous Abagnale’s life of deception was. He pioneered a new type of check-kiting and is one of the greatest social engineers the world has ever seen – all because he wanted to impress the ladies. And if his tale is to be believed, impress them he did.

19. The Power of Babel, by John McWhorter. Reviewed in depth here, Power offers us a history of human languages with a good dose of McWhorter’s own opinions, including his view that language is a dynamic, living entity that can only be constrained through fiat. He also takes the view that all “languages” are merely dialects, and explains why some languages still have nasty features like noun declensions and the subjunctive mood while others have lost them over time.

18. The Island of Lost Maps, by Miles Harvey. The Island of Lost Maps tells the story of one of the boldest and for a time most successful thieves of whom you’ve never heard, a milquetoast man – appropriately named Bland – who cut antique maps out of rare books in university libraries and sell them to collectors. Bland made about a half-million dollars in the early 1990s before he was caught. Harvey weaves Bland’s story in with a few other narratives, including a description of the map-collecting industry, the history of this sort of maps, and his own obsession with the story and with learning about the map world. That last thread is the one major negative of Island, as I’m firmly in the camp that says that a nonfiction book’s author doesn’t belong in the book unless he’s the subject as well.

17. God’s Equation, by Amir Aczel. Aczel’s first book was Fermat’s Last Theorem, a history of that famous equation and the math that led up to the ultimate solution by Andrew Wiles. The book started with a riveting description of Wiles’ first presentation of his solution – I’m serious, you’ll be caught up in it too – but the rest of the book was dry and very mathy, with only the occasional bit of real-life drama (like the suicide of one of the Japanese mathematicians whose work was invaluable to Wiles) to keep it moving. For his second book, however, Aczel chose a broader topic and crafted a much stronger narrative, describing how Albert Einstein’s greatest “mistake,” that of the cosmological constant (a sort of high-physics fudge factor) turned out, in the end, to be correct.

16. The Lighthouse Stevensons, by Bella Bathurst. The family of Robert Louis Stevenson is known for something very non-literary: constructing a series of lighthouses around the dangerous coastlines of the British Isles. Not only were these projects dangerous and very difficult, they also disenfranchised the various communities of wreckers who thrived on the proceeds of shipwrecks off their shores, often killing survivors to ensure their hauls. (Bathurst, also a journalist and the author of one novel, started to lose her hearing a few years ago after a head trauma suffered in a car crash, and wrote a column on how the loss is not entirely without compensations.)

15. The Tummy Trilogy/Feeding a Yen, both by Calvin Trillin. A series of four books that are more collections of stories of the quest for good eats across America and eventually the world. The Tummy Trilogy’s stories are more folksy, while Feeding a Yen seemed more focused on the food, although the disappearance of Trillin’s wife Alice midway through that tome is a sad reminder of her early death in 2001.

14. All the President’s Men , by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Still riveting thirty-plus years later, the book is more about the reporters’ gradual uncovering of the Watergate scandal than it is about the scandal itself. Loses a bit of its romance now that we know who “Deep Throat” was.

13. Brunelleschi’s Dome, by Ross King. The story of the construction of the cupola on the duomo of Florence, Brunelleschi’s Dome focuses on the technological advances that Brunelleschi had to drive to be able to construct such a large dome without internal supports or risk of collapse. The story offers a surprising intensity because of the deadlines, the pressure from the Church, and various other external factors that make the project’s completion seem uncertain, although I can assure you from firsthand experience that it all worked out in the end. If you enjoyed this one, you might like the similar but fluffier Tilt, by Nicholas Shrady, about that crooked tower an hour down the A11 in Pisa.

12. Nathaniel’s Nutmeg, by Giles Milton. I picked this one up in the remainders room of a local independent bookstore for no other reason than the inclusion of my favorite spice in the book’s title. It turns out that it’s a riveting and thorough history of the Indonesian spice trade, which has not a little to do with the fact that we in the United States are speaking English today and not Dutch. Black pepper, mace (the aril covering the nutmeg seed itself), and cinnamon all make appearances, but nutmeg was the spice that drove the markets and led to fierce battles and even torture over the control of the Spice Islands, particularly the tiny nutmeg-producing island of Run.

11. Millionaire, by Janet Gleeson. I may be biased on this one, as the subject of Millionaire is the inventor of paper money, a manor-born English ne’er-do-well named John Law. Law’s financial genius (just sounds right, doesn’t it?) led to the development of modern currency systems and credit markets, but also created one of the biggest speculative booms and crashes in history, and led to the need for a new word to describe those who had amassed so much wealth: “millionaire.”

10. The Island at the Center of the World, by Russell Shorto. The story of the Dutch colony New Amsterdam, the early history of Manhattan (starting with the arrival of the Europeans, that is), and the enduring influence of the Dutch culture, language, and society on New York, both city and state, and the United States in general. Shorto had access to a recently-unearthed trove of over 12,000 pages of documents from the Dutch colonial government, and the result is a fascinating story with two heroes, the idealistic Adriaen van der Donck and the better-known but half-villian Peter Stuyvesant, some serious villains in the English, the Swedes’ short-lived foray into colonization, and early experiments in things like democracy, tolerance, and free trade.

9. Living to Tell the Tale, by Gabriel García Marquéz. I’m not big on memoirs, but this book has a lot of the feel of a Marquez novel, and if you’ve read One Hundred Years of Solitude, then Living to Tell the Tale will give you a lot of insight into where the amazing stories from that novel originated. He’s lived a fascinating life, and his role as a journalist in the midst of revolutions and strife provides some incredible and often darkly comic stories.

8. Lords of the Realm, by John Helyar. Still the best book about Major League Baseball I’ve ever read, although it’s somewhat out of date. Helyar looks at MLB as a business and delves into a lot of the self-dealing and corruption that have shaped the monolithic monopoly we see today. And indeed, the self-dealing hasn’t stopped since the book’s publication.

7. Freakonomics, by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. The book responsible for the -onomics nomenclature scourge does do wonders to lift the image of the dismal science, showing how we can use data to learn things about human behavior and how we respond to changes in our economic world. Freakonomics includes a highly-controversial study of the connection between the legalization of abortion and the drop in crime in the 1990s, but also includes an interesting chapter on the life cycles of baby names, a chapter on why realtors – excuse me, Realtors® – are running a bit of a scam, and an ever more relevant chapter on cheating.

6. The Professor and the Madman/The Meaning of Everything, both by Simon Winchester. These two books, not strictly original/sequel but still inextricably linked, revolve around the production of the Oxford English Dictionary, a 70-year project that outlived all of its original heads and contributors. Professor is the better-known and more successful of the two books, telling the story of the asylum-bound murderer who proved to be one of the most prolific contributors of example sentences to the OED project, but I found it lacked the sort of narrative greed that propels Meaning, which tells the story of the OED’s history from genesis through publication, forward. I don’t see why you’d read one and not jump to read the other, though, since each offers a built-in teaser for its partner book.

5. Liar’s Poker, by Michael Lewis. I’ve got some serious issues with Moneyball, where Lewis put the narrative ahead of strict adherence to the facts, fabricating the anecdote that includes a mention of me towards the end of the book (and declining to correct it between the hardcover and paperback editions when I pointed out that it wasn’t true). As a result, I look at Liar’s Poker with a slightly jaundiced eye, because I’m not sure if the same accuracy problems infect Lewis’ other books. But I can’t deny that Lewis is a master of prose and storycraft, and Liar’s Poker is a cracking good read, with hilarious stories and comical characters and the intensity you’d expect to see in scenes set in a bond-trading room in the wild boom leading up to the 1987 crash.

4. Longitude, by Dava Sobel. I’ve always seen Longitude as the book that started the whole history-of-science book craze, by taking an esoteric story around a forgotten hero and crafting it as a novel, complete with villains, setbacks, and a linear plot that leads to a big climax. And as it turns out with so many of the best books in the genre, the invention at the heart of Longitude made the world as we know it possible: Transoceanic voyages were not safe until the invention of the chronometer, a device that allowed a ship in the middle of the ocean to determine its longitudinal location and thus its distance from Europe or the Americas. Longitude remains one of the kings in this field because the trials and tribulations faced by its hero, clockmaker John Harrison, were so severe.

3. Mauve, by Simon Garfield. The remarkable story of a teenaged chemist named William Perkin who in effect invented a color while trying to create a synthetic form of the anti-malarial compound quinine. Perkin’s mistake left him with a strong dye he called mauveine and an industrial process that would allow for easy, large-scale production. Perkin became a global celebrity, and his visit to the United States in 1906 was front-page news in the New York Times. He’s all but forgotten today outside of an award named after him that is given to a leading scientist in the field of applied chemistry.

2. Charlie Wilson’s War, by George Crile. Reviewed at length here, and soon to be a major feature film adapted by Aaron Sorkin and starring Tom Hanks. The book revolves around two amazing characters and their successful launching of the largest covert military operation in history, the U.S. funding and arming of the Afghan mujahideen, whose guerrilla warfare against Russian invaders was a major factor in the collapse of the Soviet Union.

1. Barbarians at the Gate, by Brian Burrough and John Helyar. Still, for my money, the most novelesque non-fiction book I’ve ever read. Helyar and Burrough couldn’t have created better characters if they tried. The superficial story here is the takeover battle for RJR Nabisco, but the real story is how some very wealthy and intelligent men managed to act like teenaged boys when winning became more important than maximizing profits. The leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco, until 2007 the largest LBO in history, ended up costing the victors in the battle nearly 50% more per share than the original offer due to the bidding war between multiple suitors, with the primary players being a management-led group that includes Shearson-Lehman, the buyout firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, and rival buyout firm Forstman Little. One entertaining subplot is RJR’s then-failing effort to introduce a smokeless cigarette without admitting that cigarette smoke itself was a health hazard. Good luck with that.

Filed Under: Languages, Nonfiction Tagged With: , , , , , , ,