100 Books Like Rum Histories

Originally published with Broadway Books in 2006, it was revised and updated for publication with Penguin Random House in 2018. Curtis is a talented writer and storyteller, and I found his book fun to read. He creatively uses different rum-based cocktails to tell entertaining stories of America histories.

He addresses New England rum making, colonial taverns, the American Revolution, America’s nineteenth-century struggle with Demon Rum, American Prohibition, Ernest Hemingway, the emergence of tiki culture, temperance movements, the Spanish-American War, pirates and drunken sailors, and other popular topics. Curtis also introduces the reader to popular rum-based cocktail recipes.

Chávez’s background in business and marketing offers a refreshing perspective on the history of Cuban rum and the geopolitics of the Cuban rum trade. Chávez is particularly interested in the marketing of Havana Club and the inherent contradictions that exist when a communist government enters the fray of international market capitalism. Havana Club sheds light on the Cuban government’s efforts to market itself in the modern era.

According to Chávez, Havana Club is a product of “cultural diplomacy” that has helped to “reintegrate” Cuba into international markets. As a commodity, Havana Club celebrates Cuban culture, and it has helped raise the profile of Cuba in the global cultural arena. Chávez also plays with the idea of rum authenticity in provocative ways.

I found this book interesting for its medical and psychological focus. While studies of the negative consequences of excessive drinking in the early United States have focused primarily on the societal impact of drunkenness, Osborn explores the medicalization and epidemiological debates surrounding the treatment for intemperance in the early American Republic.

Drawing primarily on the writings of early Philadelphia physicians, Osborn explores the challenges of defining and treating alcoholics and highlights the debilitating ailments that those receiving treatment faced, including hallucinations and delirium tremens. The writings of physicians, such as the renowned Philadelphia physician and temperance advocate Benjamin Rush, offer a unique medical perspective on the history of alcohol abuse and treatment. Osborn also explores how the discourse on intemperance was tied to broader cultural concerns about the strength and character of the new American Republic.

Mancall’s background as an economic historian of the Atlantic world provides an interesting take on early interactions between European colonists and Native Americans in the early New World colonies. As an anthropologist, I am always pleased to see historians, especially economic historians, integrate ethnographic evidence and anthropological literature into their research.

In this book, Mancall explores the way rum and other alcoholic beverages connected Native peoples in North America to broader Atlantic markets. Moreover, Mancall highlights the way rum connected the plight of enslaved peoples in the Caribbean to the plight of Native peoples in colonial North America.

Nixon’s concept of “slow violence” is one of the most useful for recognizing the long-term, and “slow motion urgency” of environmental damage.

His lucid storytelling highlights the environmentalism of marginalized communities. I’m inspired by his goal of changing how we think about the “deferred casualties of our poisonous, unsustainable practices.”

This book showed me how engaging, intellectual history can be written. It’s never enough to present information. If you respect your readers, as Delbanco does, keep them entertained. These twelve essays mix the personal, literary, and social in a lively and often surprising, frothy brew. I also like the way Delbanco makes the distant past relevant for today’s world.

Individual sentences are a delight. You’ll leave the book knowing much more about the life, times, and work of writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Edith Wharton, and Richard Wright.

James Alan McPherson, a writer I’d long admired and my teacher at the University of Iowa, introduced me to The Hero and the Blues. Murray and Ralph Ellison were friends and intellectual sparring partners who worked out their ideas in conversation, and in letters to one another, so it’s not surprising that many of the same ideas occur in their work.

Here, Murray argues that the hallmark of great artists, Shakespeare, Duke Ellington, and Thomas Mann, is their ability to improvise; that is, to take what they’ve learned through formal study and come up with something new. More than that, Murray writes convincingly, the blues has been essential in affirming the humanity of black Americans despite challenges complicated by the particularities of our situation.

As with Ellison, I keep coming back to Murray, again and again, for inspiration and affirmation.

In Latin America, the long shadow of Iberian imperialism and the racist caste system it left behind continue to dampen or mute expressions of indigeneity in our communities.

Speculative Fiction for Dreamers is a welcome countermeasure against this suppression of indigenous languages, myths, and traditions in Latin American storytelling. The contributors weave a tapestry of more-than-indigenous futurity, that is chimeric and cyborgian, a meshwork of continents and cosmovisions that blueprint futures and alternate presents in communion with ancestral pasts.

From Samy Figaredo’s Taíno-inspired play, to Ernest Hogan’s short story set in new Aztlán, the stories, comics, and poems in this anthology provide a Latin American perspective on indigenous speculative fiction.

There’s no feeling I like better than the feeling that you are becoming smarter with each page turning of the book in your hand. Professor Elaine Showalter made history in 1977 with a big thick book called A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing which essentially put the Wikipedia of British Women Novelists, known and unknown, between two covers, with every entry written by someone who knew their stuff cold and was overjoyed to share it with you. 

This is the American writers version and even with writers we all have heard of in school or just by spending time in bookstores and libraries, every page Prof. Showalter has something you didn’t know about Maya Angelou even if you figured, as I did, you’ve read every word ever written by and about Maya Angelou. 

Reading this book, I felt like I was best friends with… show more.

More than a century before Oprah, emancipated African Americans organized their own book clubs. They studied mainly the Western classics but also emerging black writers.

While Booker T. Washington emphasized vocational training, more militant black leaders demanded the right to read the same authors taught in elite white academies: One of their syllabuses included Milton, Spenser, Homer, Aeschylus, Longfellow, Dryden, Pope, Browning, Pindar and Sappho. Those poets, said one reader, inspired the "hope [that] the great American epic of the joys and sorrows of our blood and kindred, of those who have gone before us[,] would one day be written."

And that's exactly what happened. A young Ralph Ellison read everything in the segregated branch of the Oklahoma City library; Malcolm X was profoundly affected by Paradise Lost; and Toni Morrison minored in classics at Howard University.