The best books about drinking

The Periodic Table of Wine is sold globally to wine drinkers looking for adventure as well as beginner sommeliers starting out on their careers. Designed as a fun and quick way to give wine lovers more confidence in picking different wines they enjoy without being intimidated? The easy-to-use table, in an accessible pictorial format, shows how different wines relate, guiding you to new wines to discover and love.

China is one of the world’s leading producers and consumers of liquor, with alcohol infusing all aspects of its culture, from religion and literature to business and warfare. Yet to the outside world, China’s most famous spirit, baijiu, remains a mystery. This is about to change, as baijiu is now being served in cocktail bars beyond its borders.

Drunk in China follows Derek Sandhaus’s journey of discovery into the world’s oldest drinking culture. He travels throughout the country and around the globe to meet with distillers, brewers, snake-oil salesmen, archaeologists, and ordinary drinkers. He examines the many ways in which alcohol has shaped Chinese society and its rituals. Along the way, he uncovers a tradition spanning more than nine thousand years and explores how recent economic and political developments have conspired to push Chinese alcohol beyond the nation’s borders for the first time. As Chinese society becomes increasingly international, its drinking culture must also adapt to the times. Can the West also adapt and clink glasses with China? 

I investigate what drew formerly leftist Japanese intellectuals to Manchukuo and led them to produce literature, art, and photography there that served as "unofficial" propaganda in a state-organized around rightwing socialist political ideals.   When I began this project, I was fascinated by the idea of how someone could so readily switch their political orientation in a different context or setting.  What I discovered is that, instead of a complete breakage with earlier political ideologies, these intellectuals in the Manchukuo context still perceived a certain continuity with what they had believed in the past.  Their work both celebrating and criticizing reflections of a fascist state is absolutely fascinating!

This book is ideal for anyone who wants to complete a dry month challenge, giving up all forms of alcohol—wine, beer, spirits, and cocktails, including no shots, no low ABV cocktails, and absolutely no champagne toasts—for thirty-one days. 

Whether you’re thinking of participating in Dry January, Sober October, or want to choose a time of your own, this book walks you step-by-step through one drink-free month, from making a plan to sharing the news with friends and family (and what to do when someone tries to sabotage it) to getting back on track if you slip up and have a drink (or two).

A roman a clef about a wild and crazy party girl who gets a job writing a column about her wild and crazy party life right after going to rehab and getting sober. Funny and real, it’s the book credited with starting the “Quit Lit” movement. Now in development as a major motion picture, the New York Post declared when it was first released in 2007 that it “invented a new sub-genre: chick lit with a message.” 

Ritual presents a profound paradox: people ascribe the utmost importance to their rituals, but few can explain why they are so important. Seemingly senseless acts pervade every documented society, from handshakes to hexes, hazings to parades. Before we ever learned to farm, we were gathering in giant stone temples to perform elaborate rites. And yet, though rituals exist in every culture and can persist nearly unchanged for centuries, their logic has remained a mystery—until now. A new science of ritual reveals that it is a primordial part of human nature, that helps us soothe our anxieties, connect, find meaning, and discover who we are.

Following Mexico’s independence, alcohol became embedded in issues central to the nation-building project, including class politics, citizenship, patriotism, health, crime, cultural authenticity, gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity. Alcohol and Nationhood examines drinking culture as both an important feature of Mexican social life and as a persistent source of concern for Mexican intellectuals and politicians during the nineteenth century.

Combining historical and literary analysis of novels, newspapers, judicial records, and medical texts, Alcohol and Nationhood shows that Mexican elites worried that the physically and morally debilitating aspects of alcohol consumption were preventing Mexico’s progress, but they also identified aspects of Mexican drinking cultures that could be celebrated as part of an authentic culture. The ancient, Indigenous drink pulque epitomized both the promise and peril that drinking culture posed for imagining the nation.

This book is ideal for anyone who wants to complete a dry month challenge, giving up all forms of alcohol—wine, beer, spirits, and cocktails, including no shots, no low ABV cocktails, and absolutely no champagne toasts—for thirty-one days. 

Whether you’re thinking of participating in Dry January, Sober October, or want to choose a time of your own, this book walks you step-by-step through one drink-free month, from making a plan to sharing the news with friends and family (and what to do when someone tries to sabotage it) to getting back on track if you slip up and have a drink (or two).

A Natural History of Wine (and its companion volumes A Natural History of Beer and the forthcoming Distilled: A Natural History of Spirits) all involve the science behind the alcoholic beverages we enjoy. Having long relied on wine for inspiration while writing books on subjects as diverse as race and the origin of humans, we ultimately realized that this magical drink brings together many different branches of science, from anthropology to zoology via areas as disparate as astrophysics, neurobiology, systematics, and ecology.

And as forbidding as those subjects may sound, we realized that all are much more fun and accessible when seen through the lens of wine. We also discovered just how much understanding a drink’s history, and how it found its way to that glass in your hand, enhances one’s enjoyment of it.

Drinking with the Saints pairs beer, wine, and cocktail suggestions with the feast days of the Church year: you look up a date, read a brief sketch of the saint whose feast is being celebrated that day, and make a drink in his or her honor. The book contains over 350 cocktail recipes (38 of them original), and it even includes drinks for Lent. Besides all the tasty beverage ideas, Drinking with the Saints encourages a culture of Christian merriment and festivity. Christianity and alcohol have had a long and illustrious history together, from Chartreuse (made by Carthusian monks) to Trappist beer to Franciscan missionaries literally planting the seeds of the California wine industry.