[Rhodes22-list] Another goody for Rummy

[Robert Skinner]

http://www.amazon.com/Bottle-Rum-History-World-Cocktails/dp/1400051673/sr=1-1/qid=1159904532/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-4497046-9672127?ie=UTF8&s=books

And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails (Hardcover) 
by Wayne Curtis (Author)

August 4, 2006 Reviewer: MW (Portland, ME)
If you, like me, feel your eyelids droop at the words "history book," 
you, like me, are probably remembering the tepid tomes the nuns made 
you read in seventh grade. Well, this is NOT your grade-school 
teacher's history book. This is a lively, slightly drunken account 
that begins with the madness and mayhem that accompanied the settling 
of the New World, and from there roams far and wide through many lives 
and times. And it goes down real smooooth. It's full of stories, 
stories, stories, and boy, can this guy WRITE. Thank you, Wayne Curtis, 
for making me love history again.

 An Inspired Pub Crawl, 

August 4, 2006 Reviewer: Hannah Holmes (South Portland, ME USA)
What a pleasure to roam the shipping lanes of history with this wry 
storyteller! From rum's inception, when an industrial waste 
(molasses) trysted with the human desire to be wasted, this spirit 
has led an adventurer's life. In the beginning, in a Caribbean fouled 
with pirates, sugar and slavery, rum's fermentation was sometimes 
jump-started with a bolus of manure or an animal carcass. In the end, 
Guatemala is turning out a 23-year-old rum that tastes like moonlit 
waves and rolls you for $50. In between, rum enjoyed a bizarre and 
frequently hilarious career involving the English Navy, an 
astronomical number of limes, Paul Revere, hot pokers, Newfoundland 
salt cod, Earnest Hemingway and Fidel Castro, and the 
geographically-challenged Tiki-bar phenomenon. For a surprising 
night-cap, rum finds its way back to... well, some place it was 
before, which I also found surprising. To my even-further surprise, 
the ten cocktails mentioned in the subtitle really do chart the 
course of rum's New World bender. The additional cocktails in the 
appendix have me scribbling a shopping list: Jamaican dark, a Cuban 
light, and a Barbados medium, seventy-five limes, falernum, Thai 
basil, a bottle of that $50 Zacapa...
-- 
Robert Skinner