Product Description

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."

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1086263 in Books
• Published on: 2003-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

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.

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.

Review
Whether or not you take your martini as seriously as Lowell Edmunds, this is an admirable account of the drink's place in the American dream. -- Justin Warshaw Times Literary Supplement Edmunds seems to have unearthed every reference to the martini since its creation sometime in the 1870s, and by researching recipe books from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, he has painstakingly reconstructed the actual history of a cocktail swaddled in myth. He tracked down the first shipment of French vermouth to the United States (from Noilly Prat, in 1851). He got the lowdown on Sherwood Anderson's unfortunate death-by-toothpick after drinking a martini. He compiled a list of every martini cartoon ever to appear in the New Yorker. The martini is the last word on cocktails. This book is the last word on the martini. -- William Grimes New York Times Few drinks achieve such complex and ambiguous symbolism as the martini, and likely few writers could decode it as well as the polished Edmunds... 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. Kirkus Reviews Equal parts academic study, critical appraisal, and love letter, this book sees the martini as the liquid equivalent of jazz-a marvelous and misunderstood American art form... Edmunds fashions a convincing theory that places the feisty cocktail at the very heart of American civilization. -- Stephen Whitlock Out Magazine. Edmunds treats us to a cultural history of the martini, from its origins in the Gilded Age to its 1990s symbolism... The drink may be dry, but this book is anything but. -- Lori D. Kranz Bloomsbury Review [Edmunds] brings the rigor and thoroughness of a true scholar to the study of the Martini's place in American culture. Well Fed Network 2007