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| Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis | 
 enlarge | Author: Kingsley Amis
Creator: Christopher Hitchens
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Category: Book
List Price: $19.99
Buy New: $11.65
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Avg. Customer Rating:  12 reviews
Sales Rank: 5208
Media: Hardcover
Edition: Reprint
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 6 x 5 x 1.1
ISBN: 1596915285
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.21
EAN: 9781596915282
ASIN: 1596915285
Publication Date: May 13, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
| Showing reviews 11-12 of 12 | | « PREV | | |
 One Drunk Englishman May 28, 2008
40 out of 45 found this review helpful
If you're interested in reading about the drinking life, where better to start than with a collection of writings on drink by Kingsley Amis, introduced by Christopher Hitchens? Though it weighs in at a mere 3.2 ounces, "Everyday Drinking" offers up enough drinking experience to float an aircraft carrier.
The book comprises three Amis titles. "On Drink" (1972) is a kind of informal treatise on drinking. "Every Day Drinking" (1983) is a collection of columns. "How's Your Glass?" (1984) is a set of drinking quizzes.
Though Amis provides a good bit of technical information and asks readers to produce no end of less-than-necessary information in the quizzes (he asks us to name a liqueur made with naartjies, for example), the main pleasures of "Everyday Drinking" are to be found in Amis's description of the drinking *life* and in his sublimely crotchety sense of humor.
Some people will object that Amis's repeated grousing about music in pubs is quaint, reactionary, and ridiculous. Such people are entitled to their opinions, of course, just as the rest of us are entitled to point out that such people are either drug-addled hipsters or ill-bred morons.
For those of you out there who are neither drug-addled hipsters nor ill-bred morons, here are a few choice sips of Amis:
* On the necessity of having a refrigerator to oneself: "Wives and such are constantly filling up any refrigerator they have a claim on, even its ice compartment, with irrelevant rubbish like food."
* On being a cheapskate of a host: "In preparing a gin and tonic, for instance, put the tonic and the ice and a thick slice of lemon in first and pour on them a thimbleful of gin *over the back of a spoon*, so it will linger near the surface and give a strong-tasting first sip, which is the one that counts."
* On the claim that the Irish taught the Scots the process of distillation: "The idea of a medieval Irishman inventing a rather complicated technique like that of distilling, or anything at all for that matter, is hard to credit."
* On Galliano: "Another Italian liqueur, Galliano, has gained a good deal of ground over the last few years, not as a drink on its own but as a constituent of the famous or infamous cocktail the Harvey Wallbanger, named after some reeling idiot in California."
* On drinking with wine snobs: "If asked what you think [about the wine], say breezily, 'Jolly good,' as though you always say that whatever it's like. This may suggest that your mind's on higher things than wine, like gin or sex."
Amis might be accused of being a bit harsh at times, as when he claims that the Pina Colada is "[j]ust the thing for the 95-IQ female" and that drinking lager and lime is "an exit application from the human race," but you have to admire a man who defends his convictions with such vigor. As someone who has been known to toss back lots (and lots) of Pina Coladas *and* lagers with lime when the weather's hot, I am more than willing to endure Amis's ridicule in exchange for the pleasure of having him ridicule wine snobs and Canadians.
He ridicules Canadians in a loving way, of course, just as he ridicules the Irish, Americans, and Kingsley Amis. As for wine snobs, they deserve their ridicule neat.
My one complaint about the book is that the introduction is on the short side. Hitchens is as entertaining as Amis, and an even better crafter of sentences, and I would have enjoyed a few more pages. Must have been pushing a deadline. Or running up against cocktail hour.
A supremely witty treatment of the subject of boozemanship. November 28, 1998
10 out of 11 found this review helpful
Kingsley Amis writes in the breezy style of a good English gent, on a subject about which he has much knowledge and even more experience--boozemanship. This series of short articles provides an authoritative statement on what to drink and how to drink it, along with with a hefty jigger of Amis's profoundly hilarious sense of understatement.
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