Customer Reviews

The Martini: An Illustrated History of an American Classic

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In this PC-infested world, it is refreshing to find an author with not only the audacity but also the innate talent to immortalize one of the greatest contributions to humanity ever devised--the martini. Every serious savorer of that pure clear elixir should read this book, not only for the historical background of the martini, but to reassure himself that his is a noble cause--to prepare the perfect martini.

This literary homage to the silver bullet is a striking, artfully rendered production. Many images from the modernism gallery in San Francisco complement the clarity of the text. Cultural references are numerous and well chosen, including elements from the silver screen and politics. Altogether a pleasure to read and view!

The Martini can take its drinker to a higher level. The edge softens. The world becomes a simpler place. A smile is forthcoming. I derived similar pleasure while reading this book.

This book is great--it has history, humor, and lots of glamorous pictures, and manages to keep the cheese factor very low. A great gift for the drinkers in your life!

This beautiful "coffee table" style book is dedicated to that most beautiful and perfect of cocktails, the inestimable martini.

Conrad's informative text, colorful anecdotes, and lavish illustrations make this book a wonderful addition to the great miracle it celebrates.

Mix yourself a martini, (two olives, shaken -- not stirred) relax in an easy chair, and enjoy this book!

A coffee table book, defined as one where the picture to text ratio is 1:1 or greater. That doesn't diminish the collection of text and images that Barnaby Conrad has put together in this slim volume, but as an exhaustive work on the mixture of gin and vermouth garnished with an olive this is not. Conrad does manage to bring together some things that I hadn't seen or read before in my cocktail explorations, including a very dry (heh heh) bit of humor from Christopher Buckley on a presidential debate between George "Pappy" Bush and Bill Clinton called "The Three Martini Debate," derived from a Tom Brokaw quote in The New York Times that serving the two a martini and having an exchange at his house would be a good alternative format. None of the pictures made my list of favorites, although the old advertisements and movie stills were interesting, and the cartoons, mainly from The New Yorker, were fun. Only two poems, one of which I was already intimately familiar with (the Dorothy Parker), but the other was one which I will endeavor to memorize, Ogden Nash's "A Drink with Something In It."

The single thing that I learned about the cocktail itself from the book was that the original recipe called for orange bitters in a 2:1 gin and vermouth combination. Since I actually have a bottle or orange bitters after having searched for a year for one, I can give this a try.

I've had this book for about 8 years and I just love it.

Its not a recipe book, but rather a colourful tribute to the classic cocktail. It contains historical information and lore about Martinis. Its worth the price for the pictures alone.

Wonderful book. As advertised. Prompt shipment. I would definitely recommend this seller and surely buy from again.

This book is the perfect complement to martini hour. It's filled with interesting historical tidbits, quotes, and photos of famous martini drinkers and the beverage in question. It's a great gift for any martini fan.

Now HERE is a hip coffee-table book. It's true that it isn't as colorful (or fundamentally healthy in subject) as Drew Kampion's "Stoked: A History of Surf Culture" (ISBN 1575440628). Nor as vividly gothic as David King's "The Commissar Vanishes," containing photographs re-touched during the Stalin regime so that unpersons might become unremembered, while the old women with the thick glasses and awkward sheaves of the forbidden-book registry (updated monthly) made the rounds of the bookshops and libraries to preen the inventory (ISBN 0805052941). Nor again is it as deeply, internationally hip as Conrad's earlier "Absinthe: History in a Bottle" (1988, reprinted 1997, ISBN 0811816508). As a European-émigré acquaintance recalled, for example: "It was 1950, we had just been married, we were driving through this little town in Switzerland. It was a Sunday after church, and the place seemed deserted. But there was a large inn, where we stopped. Most of the town was there, having a glass of wine. There was also a little private room, and the local leaders were there, the mayor, the bishop, the chief of police, and the innkeeper, who had come out to see who we were. While the rest of the people were having a glass of wine, they were off to themselves, having an absinthe, a little furtively. All perfectly illegal, and totally charming. I made a witty remark about this, a little off-color. The bishop laughed heartily, and they welcomed us in and gave us each an absinthe and toasted our marriage." (See also my separate recommendation posted for the Conrad "Absinthe.")

These are all interesting coffee-table books, and they all deal with some kind of history. But none of the others starts with lines like "I must get out of these wet clothes and into a dry Martini." Conrad's Martini book is the most US-pop-culture-hip of this bunch. It is light-hearted and loaded with trivia, from old magazine advertisements to collectible cocktail shakers to an unforgettable movie photo on page 53 of Joan Crawford in high-contrast black-and-white, Martini in one hand, cigarette in the other. It is an instructive history as well as a very funny narrative.

By the late 1970s the Martini was dying out, as Conrad mentions; it was unhip, old-fashioned. By 1990 (Conrad doesn't mention but I do) a character in Eric Kraft's contemporary novel "Reservations Recommended" (ISBN 0517572338) was so out-of-it that he "ordered a martini without irony." You wouldn't have guessed it by the late 1990s when a suburban Crate-and-Barrel store was selling seemingly little else but Martini glasses and 1930s-reproduction cocktail shakers, and the Libbey Glass website offered numerous Martini models including with Z-stems. The Martini did not stay unhip for long.