A Short History of Drunkenness

By Mark Forsyth,

Book cover of A Short History of Drunkenness: How, Why, Where, and When Humankind Has Gotten Merry from the Stone Age to the  Present

Book description

THE PERFECT GIFT FOR ANYONE WHO ENJOYS A TIPPLE . . . OR TWO . . . OR TEN!

Almost every culture on earth has drink, and where there's drink there's drunkenness. But in every age and in every place drunkenness is a little bit different. Tracing humankind's love affair…

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Why read it?

1 author picked A Short History of Drunkenness as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

This is a great one to read in tandem with The Dawn of Everything, as they cover a similarly enormous timespan but in very different ways.

The provocative suggestion that humans might have invented agriculture primarily as a means of having more regular and reliable access to booze was… unexpected! The more modern eras of history are also handled punchily, including some forceful overturning of the most enduring misconceptions about the 1920s prohibition of alcohol in the United States.

Forysth’s telling of human history through our myriad, complicated ways of getting drunk and all the social and legal rules…

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Tap Dancing on Everest by Mimi Zieman,

Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.

The team attempts a new route up…

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