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This well-organized and highly readable volume represents an impressive compendium of the role of alcohol in human civilization. Its subtext is unabashedly a celebration of “beverage alcohol” as integral to human cultural experience. Rife with informative glimpses of the breadth of “drinking occasions” across myriad cultures past and present, the author argues for the ubiquity of alcohol and for its centrality to social interactions and cultural rituals. With a consistently positive point of view, he celebrates alcohol for its “social, psychological and physical benefits” and asserts, “Drinking is often what makes an occasion special.”
The author is a Professor of Anthropology at Brown University with “nearly 40 years of research on drinking around the world, and about a dozen years of concern about national and international policies as they relate to folk beliefs and behavior.” The book was commissioned by the International Center for Alcohol Policies (ICAP), which describes itself as “a not-for-profit organization supported by 11 major international beverage alcohol companies.” Its corporate backing raises the question as to what degree the book supports a political as well as an academic agenda. In the Forward, the President of ICAP addresses this question forthrightly, asserting that this volume was written in a scholarly manner with every intention of being free from bias. At the same time, both sponsor and author suggest that the book is needed to counter-balance what is perceived to be a negative bias of much alcohol-related literature. In his introduction, Heath advocates for the need to study normal as opposed to pathological drinking by quoting “the famous sociologist Selden Bacon ” in stating, ‘We'd never learn much about the impact of the automobile if all we paid attention to were accidents.’ ”
The book is organized according to the journalistic principle of asking and answering the five questions “When? Where? Who? How? Why?” as these pertain to alcohol