Product Description

One spirit, Ten cocktails, and Four Centuries of American History

And a Bottle of Rum tells the raucously entertaining story of America as seen through the bottom of a drinking glass. With a chapter for each of ten cocktails—from the grog sailors drank on the high seas in the 1700s to the mojitos of modern club hoppers—Wayne Curtis reveals that the homely spirit once distilled from the industrial waste of the exploding sugar trade has managed to infiltrate every stratum of New World society.

Curtis takes us from the taverns of the American colonies, where rum delivered both a cheap wallop and cash for the Revolution, to the plundering pirate ships off the coast of Central America, to the watering holes of pre-Castro Cuba, and to the kitsch-laden tiki bars of 1950s America. Here are sugar barons and their armies conquering the Caribbean, Paul Revere stopping for a nip during his famous ride, Prohibitionists marching against “demon rum,” Hemingway fattening his liver with Havana daiquiris, and today’s bartenders reviving old favorites like Planter’s Punch. In an age of microbrewed beer and single-malt whiskeys, rum—once the swill of the common man—has found its way into the tasting rooms of the most discriminating drinkers.

Awash with local color and wry humor, And a Bottle of Rum is an affectionate toast to this most American of liquors, a chameleon spirit that has been constantly reinvented over the centuries by tavern keepers, bootleggers, lounge lizards, and marketing gurus. Complete with cocktail recipes for would-be epicurean time-travelers, this is history at its most intoxicating.


From the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #35341 in Books
• Published on: 2007-06-05
• Released on: 2007-06-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Like a great barroom raconteur, the author of this engaging treatise regales his audience with piquant opinions, colorful trivia, lush rhetorical turns ("[t]he first taste washes over me and brings to mind the scene in Wizard of Oz in which the black-and-white world suddenly bursts into color") and an exalted, occasionally inflated, sense of liquor's place in the greater scheme of things. A travel writer and contributing editor to Preservation, Curtis follows rum's checkered 400-year career through various incarnations, from the cheap, caustic "kill-devil" that fortified 17th-century pirates (Blackbeard was said to enjoy a glass of flaming rum mixed with gunpowder) to today's mojitos, made from palatable, if bland, mass market rums. His profiles of rum-based cocktails (with an all-important appendix of recipes) serve as starting points for excursions on such topics as slavery in the West Indies, the temperance movement, Ernest Hemingway's epic daiquiri binges and the rise and fall of the tiki bar. Curtis's grander pronouncements ("Rum embodies America's laissez-faire attitude: It is whatever it wants to be")are true only in the groggiest sense, but readers who come along on this charming barhop through cultural history will toast them nonetheless. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
Toasts to And a Bottle of Rum

“And a Bottle of Rum is a fascinating tale of cultural metamorphosis, tracing rum’s remarkable journey from colonial rotgut to SoHo cocktail. A book with as many revelations about American history as about this archetypally American drink.” —Jack Turner, author of Spice: The History of a Temptation

“History never tasted so good. What Herbert Asbury did for the gangs of New York, Wayne Curtis does for rum: The profiteers who traded it, the pirates who raided it, the underclass who guzzled it, the mixologists who exalted it, and the corporations who homogenized it—Curtis tells their tale with style and sweep in a tour de force of social history, urban anthropology, and cocktail ‘alcohology.’ A delight from first sip to last.” —Jeff Berry, author of Beachbum Berry’s Grog Log, Intoxica!, and Taboo Table

“And a Bottle of Rum reveals the facts behind rum’s colorful history while telling a great story of rebellion and rumbustion!” —Dale DeGroff, author of The Craft of the Cocktail

“Wayne Curtis breaks fascinating new ground in this very palatable history of the world-through-rum-colored glasses. The writing shows what makes modern journalism so great: clean, succinct, inclusive smoothness—not unlike great rum—and Curtis is a virtuoso at it.” —Ted “Dr. Cocktail” Haigh, author of Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails


From the Hardcover edition.

About the Author
Wayne Curtis is a contributing editor to Preservation magazine, and his stories on travel, architecture, and history have appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, The American Scholar, and American Heritage. In 2002 Curtis was named Lowell Thomas Travel Journalist of the Year by the Society of American Travel Writers. He lives in Maine. For more information about rum or the author, visit RepublicOfRum.com.


From the Hardcover edition.

Customer Reviews

A raucous rampage through the history of rum
This is a well-researched, enjoyable read about the role of rum in the history of the Americas. It is a bit overly focused on North America (and the United States in general). I would have liked to read more detail about the islands and Brazil, but they are generally addressed. And when you're done, there's an appendix with several great cocktail recipes! What's not to like?

Now this is rum!
And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails is really all about rum. Should be obvious from the title, but some of these narrow-focus histories are all about social context and compelling commentary. And a Bottle of Rum has these things, but when all is said and done, reading this book is more like drinking a fine rum than reading an ordinary history. Curtis writes with the practiced ease of someone who's thoroughly familiar with his subject, and who doesn't have anything to prove, although at one point it seemed clear to me that he was aiming to undo some of the exaggeration Ian Williams presented in his earlier book. But there is no pervasive attitude of having to prove that rum was one thing or another; Curtis tells it like it is.

For such a short book, the reader never feels like he's missing something; if I only had this book about rum, I think that'd be enough. The title is misleading; Curtis doesn't stop at ten simple cocktails - he gives you the whole run that rum has made from its haziest origins to present upscale rum bars. The author appends a modest list of easy-to-find and enjoyable rums; the list is not comprehensive, but would serve as a good jumping point for those wishing to try different styles. He also includes some of his favorite recipes besides the ten featured in the core chapters. Technically, if you don't consider punch or grog to be a cocktail, it's only six, since Chapter 6 is about Prohibition and features a recipe for the nonalcoholic Prune Water, and the first chapter is simply entitled Kill-Devil. This is not a nitpick; no chapter is out of place here.

If I had to nitpick, I would only point out the lack of in-text citations; Curtis has included a bibliography, and the overall feel of the book is very casual, but those wishing to cross-reference facts may have to do some wading. That said, Curtis is not given to hyperbole, and his critical analysis is of excellent caliber. You get a good sense of the real global context of rum while reading this. Indeed, because of the friendly journalistic style, you tend to feel as though you're scheming in a colonial tavern, sailing aboard a naval galleon, sitting right next to Hemingway, or swapping surf stories in a tiki bar.

In all, this is a highly enjoyable read; if rum is your drink, And a Bottle of Rum should be your book. Wayne Curtis has the field experience of a real rum connoisseur, and his warm writing style really reflects his encompassing love for the stuff. Reviewers tend to overuse phrases like "I couldn't put it down," but in this case the book flowed so neatly I did find myself suffering from a strong case of the Just-One-More-Chapters. I'd give it 4.5 stars, but I'll bump it up to 5 for Amazon.

Great Book Mixing Rum and History
A very engaging read and a interesting, nay. . . unique way of formatting the different periods of time that he traces out in his book. Filled with a great deal of information laid out in a easy to read,at times humorous manner.

A well written and researched book and a must have for the rum Enthusiast who wishes to talk to anyone else knowledgeably on the subject. The drinks section has a number of excellent rum drinks that you will probably not easily find anywhere else as they cross a long span of time and he is particularly deft at gathering some interesting (and perhaps more important) eminently drinkable recipes.