Product Description

Due to popular demand, Absinthe is back with a handsome new paper cover. Like the author's bestselling The Martini and The Cigar, it is a potent brew of wild nights and social history, facts and trivia, gorgeous art and beautiful artifacts. A perfect gift for anyone who knows how to celebrate vice!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #354851 in Books
• Published on: 1996-10-17
• Released on: 1996-10-17
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .43" h x 7.82" w x 11.22" l, 1.58 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 172 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Few drinks conjure the cultural associations and charged atmospheres that absinthe does, even now, some 70 years after its ban in Europe and the U.S. Freelance writer Conrad sees absinthe "as a skeleton key to the fin de siecle's secrets." An engaging combination of art history, sociology, travelogue and artists' biography, this clever hybrid recounts both the praise heaped upon the alcoholic beverage and the tales of destroyed creativity and absinthe-related violence that led to its prohibition. Turn-of-the-century Paris comes alive, as does its expatriate society of the '20s. Oil paintings, etchings and artifacts with absinthe themes by Manet, Van Gogh, Lautrec and others adorn the pages, and quotes and anecdotes about the green liqueur by Wilde, Baudelaire and Hemingway fill the well-researched text. More sober chapters include "The Origins of Ancient and Modern Absinthe" and "Absinthe and Politics," which links certain temperance movements to anti-Semitism. Like its subject, this volume is addictive and enchanting.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

Absinthe, as reviled in its time as crack cocaine is today, now seems the rather quaint forbidden fruit of a more innocent age. We think of " fin-de-si cle" poets guzzling it in stagy despair or old paintings of stoned-out Parisians who don't look as if they're having that much fun slouched over their liqueur glasses.

But absinthe-drinking certainly was a drug scene. A serious "absintheur" would add the water to the liqueur slowly, pouring it over a sugar cube in an elaborate slotted spoon with a ritualistic absorption that reminds us of a junkie shooting up.

Like its non-scandalous descendant, Pernod, absinthe turned milky when mixed with water, with an opalescent greenish tone. Emerald green came to have the same implication of druggy ecstasy in the art of the 1890s that paisleys and mandalas had in the psychedelic '60s.

There is a curious history here, and Barnaby Conrad III recounts a lot of it in this fascinating book first published in 1988 and recently reissue

New York Times, December 16, 1988
In "Absinthe: History in a Bottle," Barnaby Conrad 3d has set out to give equal weight to absinthe as a social phenomenon and absinthe as an imaginative theme. The result is an engaging exercise in cultural history . . . "Absinthe" is a handsome book, too, with nearly 200 illustrations, more than 60 of them in color. This is as it should be, since the figures who play their part in the story include Manet, Degas, Gauguin, Toulouse-lautrec, van Gogh and Picasso. But Mr. Conrad also finds room for a wealth of pictorial documentation: brilliantly colored posters, caricatures, photographs, drawings from magazines, enticing labels, temperance propaganda.