Booklist: Jarring and Entertaining
“Slingerland, though, has no truck with drunky cuteness. He’s a scholar, with solid academic credentials and a professorial display of charts and statistics, which readers can comfortably skip but that do provide scientific and historical justification for a wealth of jarring and entertaining statements: “We wouldn’t have civilization as we know it without intoxication in some form.” That the form was alcoholic largely accounts for the agrarian expansion that created the modern world: got to have something to ferment. Chunks of the study sing the benevolence and importance of the sauce in business, religion, friendship, the arts, and romance”
Don Crinklaw, “Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization,” Booklist, May 1, 2021
