Hooch: The Greeks worshipped it; the Aztecs were a little more conflicted
The popular history of a humdrum object—that faddish genre in which the most boring items on your dining-room table (salt, cod, potatoes, bananas, chocolate) are revealed to be secret juggernauts of profound social change—has recently become so popular that it’s probably time for someone to write a popular history of it. If I were forced, I’d diagnose the trend as yet another symptom (like $4 gas or home foreclosures) of our current flavor of late-phase capitalism—a commercialism so far advanced we’ve begun transferring historical glories from our leaders (Napoleon, Churchill, Gandhi) to our products, so that we find ourselves surrounded by greatness in every aisle of Whole Foods. I’d also add, if forced, that the genre’s wild success seems to predict its own obsolescence: The conclusion that everything is integral to the history of everything is perilously close, in the end, to no conclusion at all.
True to form, Iain Gately’s new book, Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol, posits its subject as the lifeblood of the world. Booze has presided over executions and business deals and marriages and births. It inspired the ancient Greeks to invent not only democracy but comedy and tragedy. It helped goad America’s Founding Fathers into revolution.
Good popular history requires a paradoxical skill set: on one hand, the centrifugal instinct to roam widely for obscure details that would otherwise rot, neglected, in far corners of the archives; on the other, a centripetal impulse to radically compress those rescued details for an audience that might well have forgotten the basic outlines of WWII. Pop histories must be simultaneously comprehensive and concise, expansive and abridged, deep and shallow. Gately is, by every indication, a prodigious hoarder—Drink runs to 500 pages of closely printed text; it quotes “Gilgamesh” and Beowulf and Ogden Nash, as well as government studies of binge drinking and academic tracts on ancient viticulture. But he seems to lack the ruthlessness necessary to streamline all of that detritus into a functional narrative. There are vast stretches of prohibitive dryness. The pace is erratic: One page will plunge into frustrating detail about minor colonial politics; another will skip briskly over the Black Death, the Hundred Years War, and the fall of feudalism. Most of all, for such a big book, Drink suffers from a shortage of big ideas. Its opening sentence—“Alcohol is a fundamental part of Western culture”—wouldn’t surprise the driest teetotaler or the wettest lush, and yet it’s as close as the book ever gets to a real thesis.
Read entire article at Sam Anderson at Arts & Letters Daily website
True to form, Iain Gately’s new book, Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol, posits its subject as the lifeblood of the world. Booze has presided over executions and business deals and marriages and births. It inspired the ancient Greeks to invent not only democracy but comedy and tragedy. It helped goad America’s Founding Fathers into revolution.
Good popular history requires a paradoxical skill set: on one hand, the centrifugal instinct to roam widely for obscure details that would otherwise rot, neglected, in far corners of the archives; on the other, a centripetal impulse to radically compress those rescued details for an audience that might well have forgotten the basic outlines of WWII. Pop histories must be simultaneously comprehensive and concise, expansive and abridged, deep and shallow. Gately is, by every indication, a prodigious hoarder—Drink runs to 500 pages of closely printed text; it quotes “Gilgamesh” and Beowulf and Ogden Nash, as well as government studies of binge drinking and academic tracts on ancient viticulture. But he seems to lack the ruthlessness necessary to streamline all of that detritus into a functional narrative. There are vast stretches of prohibitive dryness. The pace is erratic: One page will plunge into frustrating detail about minor colonial politics; another will skip briskly over the Black Death, the Hundred Years War, and the fall of feudalism. Most of all, for such a big book, Drink suffers from a shortage of big ideas. Its opening sentence—“Alcohol is a fundamental part of Western culture”—wouldn’t surprise the driest teetotaler or the wettest lush, and yet it’s as close as the book ever gets to a real thesis.