The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, and Christoper Hitchens. I may read all three with a certain mixture of regard and disregard, but rarely do I link over. Today I'll make an exception, for Hitchens' review of Eric Felten's forthcoming Cocktails, Culture, and the Art of Drinking Well. RM has long been an admirer of Felten's reviews in the WSJ, I believe, and I am duly excited by the arrival of this book. I'm sure it will be well-worn copy, referenced often by Mssrs. M and W and myself. From Hitchens' review:
His remark about one or two but never three has been, I hope, lifted from my own axiom about the relationship between martinis and female breasts. One is too few. Three is too many. Two seems somehow superbly right. His second observation, about the girlie factor, is something that greatly preoccupies Felten. When all is said, isn't there something very slightly fussy about all this mixing and shaking and measuring: something, perhaps, fractionally light in the loafers?
Borrowing from an old Esquire distinction, he suggests that masculine cocktails involve whiskey whereas feminine ones "lean heavily on cream, fruit juices and crème de this-and-that." That seems fair enough, except that both he and Kingsley Amis (about whom there was nothing limp-wristed) demonstrate a high degree of affection for the "Irish Coffee" cocktail and the exquisitely careful means of making it. Of course whiskey, which Felten calls "that least feminine-seeming of spirits," is involved, so the honors here can be reckoned as about even.
I believe we are all agreed. And to off-set the war-mongering behind all of this, three from Uncle Bob and GBV, everyman's drinking man.
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