Martini, Straight Up: The Classic American Cocktail [Paperback]

Lowell Edmunds (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 7, 2003

From its contested origins in nineteenth-century California; through its popularity among the smart set of the 1930s, world leaders of the 1940s, and the men in the gray flannel suits of the 1950s; to its resurgence among today's retro-hipsters: Lowell Edmunds traces the history and cultural significance of the cocktail H. L. Mencken called "the only American invention as perfect as a sonnet."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

It is the drink of businessmen, alcoholics and the social elite?a cocktail so iconographic that it merits its own glass. In this scholarly study, Edmunds (a classics professor at Rutgers) examines the martini's prominent place in American culture and the wealth of distinct, at times contradictory, messages that the drink has come to convey. Invented in the U.S. in the 1870s, the martini soon aligned itself with the upper-class, adult male drinker: either the Ivy League WASP or the top-ranked executive at lunch. Yet, Edmunds argues, the martini is also a notoriously tricky drink to pin down: it's an emblem of both restraint and excess, an aphrodisiac and the solitary drinker's companion, a classic cocktail that people are constantly trying to perfect. Edmunds analyzes references to the elixir, from the writings of Dorothy Parker and Jack London to New Yorker cartoons, TV movies and M*A*S*H. In the process he marshals some compelling trivia, such as the origin of the name (most likely the city of Martinez, Calif.) and the ways in which some people strive to obtain the driest possible martini (e.g., merely whispering the word "vermouth" over the gin). But Edmunds, who relishes the label of "martini elitist," makes no secret of his disdain for the current retro martini craze with its "specialty martinis" and youthful swingers, and his refusal to give the movement more than passing mention seems a glaring omission. Ultimately, he fails to delve below these cultural signifiers to reveal anything particularly original about why it is that we, as a society, so love the martini. Despite the author's extensive research, the academic tone makes this curiously dispassionate work as dry, and as rarefied, as the martini itself?but without the buzz.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Kirkus Reviews

Few drinks achieve such complex and ambiguous symbolism as the martini, and likely few writers could decode it as well as the polished Edmunds (Classics/Rutgers Univ.). Consider the martini a true American icon, says Edmunds (its status as an institution waxes and wanes), but a fungible one with so many associations that drinkers can grab whichever one they like and run with it. For many, the drink radiates what Edmunds calls ``seven simple messages'': it is American, urban and urbane, of high status, a man's drink, optimistic, adult, and a drink of the past, timelessly of the past. Almost all of the signifiers can now be labeled as once was (once, it was the drink of diplomats, the sophisticate, the denizens of the smoking room), for Edmunds serves up a welter of deflationary material, toppling the martini from its elite roost. He draws positive and negative imagery enough from literature (Dorothy Parker to Jack London), film (Buuel to Lang to The Lost Weekend), New Yorker cartoons, Cole Porter lyrics, W.H. Auden haiku, Jimmy Carter (who poked his finger in the eye of the three-martini lunch), to diagnose the martini with a severe but endearing multiple-personality disorder. Once he has covered the social history of the cocktail, he delves into its origins and its various configurations (martini rituals that are surely as codified as the tea ceremony), and there is a chapter on the classic martini glassthe stemmed, V-shaped vessel with its own iconic powerthat is as elegant as the glass itself. Though its clear from the book that Edmunds is a martini fancier, he is not a martini bully: He likes his martini straight up, but he also admits to many classically correct variations. Such is the unadorned pleasure of Edmunds's book, its rare scholarly intimacy, that there can be little doubt that he delighted in his fieldwork very much. (illustrations, not seen) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press (March 7, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0801873118
• ISBN-13: 978-0801873119
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 6.4 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.3 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,104,523 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars straight up, with a twist., March 20, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Martini, Straight Up: The Classic American Cocktail (Hardcover)

Never before has there been such a necessity for the reissuing of this book. With this so-called renaissance of The Martini, many would do well to allow themselves to be indoctrinated by Lowell Edmunds. Until recently, the previous edition of Martini: Straight Up, --The Silver Bullet: The Martini in American Civilization (1981) has been out of print. Thank goodness for the reprinting of such a studied and honest book about The Martini. Although I find the original title more elegant. Perhaps the new, shorter, title is aimed at those who have only known the classic drink in short term. Within the book, Edmunds explores the drink's historicity, political, literary, and otherwise, as well as the social complexity of this American icon. With Martini, Straight Up, Edmunds dispells myths and reassures us about a legend who's status may be on the rise, but who's golden era has long since passed.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Song of the Silver Bullet, December 3, 2002

By 

Randall Ivey "Randall" (USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Martini, Straight Up: The Classic American Cocktail (Hardcover)

What a perfectly titled book! Edmunds gives us nothing but straight talk about The American Cocktail in this erudite but charming little treatise on the place of the Martini in American civilization. He uses a vast array of sources from the nineteenth century on up to prove the enduring quality of this fabled drink and the way it has come to symbolize so many things to so many different kinds of people, whether they are Presidents, bank officials, or everyday housewives. To Edmunds it is the contradictory nature of the drink that has lent it its immortality (in a time, he admits, when the traditional rituals surrounding the Martini may well be on their way out for good). The drink is civilized; it is uncivilized; it is strong; it is sensitive, etc., all depending on who is drinking it at the time. Among the sources Edmunds consults and displays are the old Thin Man movies (which, the author points out, constantly violate the accepted rules for drinking Martinis), the fiction of Jack London and Ernest Hemingway, old bartender manuals, cookbooks, magazine ads, and numerous New Yorker cartoons through the years. He mixes all these into an irresistibly lucid collage.

As intellectual as this delightful little exercise is, it nevertheless makes one year for a good stiff drink. I think I will have one. Heavy on the gin. Shaken not stirred. And straight up, of course. For, as Edmunds points out unequivocably, "a martini on the rocks is an abomination."

Read it, drink it, and enjoy.

5.0 out of 5 stars A Book Worthy of the Drink, January 12, 2010

By 

Reader and Writer (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Martini, Straight Up: The Classic American Cocktail (Paperback)

The "Mythologies" of the martini.

In this age of mixology trendiness, there is a lot of poorly written and pompous stuff passing for "cocktail scholarship." This charming book blows them all away, and it deserves to be much better known.

After a hysterical Preface, which includes a death wish, Edmunds gives a beautiful, concise history of the drink and then dives into what is the main topic of the work: the symbolic meaning the martini has accrued in our culture. He's a great researcher -- there are references here to the drink in obscure bestsellers of the time, movies, newspaper articles, design, pop art -- and he knows how to read all these media deeply and creatively so as to reveal the surprising messages the drink is asked to carry. I found his analysis of the gender/dominance messages of the martini particularly insightful.

Most importantly, Edmunds never loses sight of the essential lightness of his topic. He is having fun with it all, and is even lightly self-deprecating. Even the organization of the book is witty -- broken into "Simple Messages of the Martini" (e.g., "The Martini is optimistic, not pessimistic") and "Ambiguities of the Martini" ("The martini unites - the martini separates"). Drunken musings of a sober mind. Like Roland Barthes, Edmund's analysis only enhances our pleasure.