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The Wet and the Dry

A Drinker's Journey

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
Selected as a Top Ten Book of the Year by Dwight Garner, New York Times
A “fearlessly honest account” (Financial Times) of man’s love of drink, and an insightful meditation on the meaning of alcohol consumption across cultures worldwide

 
Drinking alcohol: a beloved tradition, a dangerous addiction, even “a sickness of the soul” (as once described by a group of young Muslim men in Bali). In his wide-ranging travels, Lawrence Osborne—a veritable connoisseur himself—has witnessed opposing views of alcohol across cultures worldwide, compelling him to wonder: is drinking alcohol a sign of civilization and sanity, or the very reverse? Where do societies fall on the spectrum between indulgence and restraint? 
  
An immersing, controversial, and often irreverent travel narrative, The Wet and the Dry offers provocative, sometimes unsettling insights into the deeply embedded conflicts between East and West, and the surprising influence of drinking on the contemporary world today.
Now with an excerpt from Lawrence Osborne's latest novel, The Ballad of a Small Player.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from May 13, 2013
      The British-born peripatetic novelist and travel writer Osborne has proved himself spectacularly adventurous in previous works (The Forgiven; Bangkok Days; etc.); in his latest outing, he similarly unfurls serious adventures through righteous Muslim lands in search of a drink. Osborne scorns facile observations, especially about himself: he is a connoisseur of self-knowledge, in particular regarding his states of solitary drinking and altered moods. He is also a practiced traveler, and heads to the desiccated Arab lands as a kind of perverse punishment—for example, when he tries (and fails) to score a bottle of champagne on New Year’s Eve in Muscat, Oman, with his Italian lover. Bars are geared to Westerners (“the unclean”) in places like Saudi Arabia and Malaysia only because it was good business, while often, curious Muslims are intercepted upon entering these bars and even punished by caning or thrashing. Osborne elicits some profound and harrowing reflections along the way about the wet and the dry cultures, falling rather cleanly along ideological lines—namely, that being able to drink and enjoy public gathering spaces spells freedom, while being restricted from drinking alcohol, as suggested rather than dictated by the Koran, means being immured in private cells. From Dubai to Beirut, Islamabad to Brooklyn, Osborne’s meditations on fermentation and distillation induce a host of refreshing, taut, timeless unmoorings.

    • Kirkus

      June 1, 2013
      A cosmopolitan and prodigious drinker conducts a tour to selected locales where alcohol flows easily and to others where such spirits are strictly forbidden. Peripatetic imbiber Osborne (The Forgiven, 2012, etc.) recounts getting drunk in many places and recalls libations from hospitable venues like his British home, Brooklyn and Sweden. He also discusses arid Islamic precincts like Islamabad and the Bekaa. We visit Cairo, under the Brotherhood, and southern Thailand, where they host Malaysian Muslims seeking sex and whiskey. Osborne makes an ardent, artful contribution to a great body of literature on booze. Though he had difficulty scoring some bubbly for his girlfriend on a New Year's Eve in Muscat, Osborne is still a debonair drinking partner, one who knows the authentic bars and pubs of the West and the wet oases in the parched lands of the Islamic Levant and Orient. Kota, he reports, "was a much nicer city than Sungai Kolok or Hat Yai." In the meyhanes of Istanbul's Istiklal, we learn, you will "down your raki with plates of borek, and slowly realize that you are an alien." Adept of Dionysus and Bacchus, Osborne provides a convivial discourse on how liquor is made and marketed in exotic places. There are thoughts on the history and politics of potent drink and the Muslim antipathy to satanic Western ways. In the bars of the West and the speak-easies of Araby, the author celebrates intemperate alcoholic befuddlement and also the hangover after too many drams of distinctive distillations and fine fermentations, of Pernod, Jim Beam, Cutty Sark and Stoli. For tipplers or teetotalers, an extended essay on drink in some precincts where it is welcome and others where it is criminal--rakish, rich and nicely served.

      COPYRIGHT(2013) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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