I like to drink. I also like to read, and if said book isn’t a gigantic tome, I’m more than willing to give it a try. When I came across Mark Forsyth’s 2017 “history book,” A Short History of Drunkenness, I had to make an attempt to read it. At less than 300 pages, it’s the perfect length for me to squeeze into a week. In the beginning, I wasn’t sure if I’d like it. Turns out I did and enjoyed it a good deal. While not a top rated, top shelf favorite, not everything can be. However, I’ll put it on the next shelf down, a most respectable position...

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A humorous and enjoyable non-fiction read full of interesting facts and historical anecdotes, recounted in a way that made me giggle a little bit, and want to drink a little more.

Forsyth stresses that this really is just a ‘short history’, and I understand he can’t cover everything, nonetheless I was hoping for something with a little more depth, and references would’ve been nice too. However, this is more of a popular history – chapters are written in a short, punchy style with plenty of amusing and witty lines, skimming the surface of the subject. Don't take Forsyth’s humour in earnest though. For example, Forsyth jokes that drinking alcohol could’ve been the primary reason why humans became sedentary and civilisations arose. He draws this from genuine discussions in archaeology noting that drinking alcohol may have been seen as a religious experience and that in order to make lots of it would require settling down and permanently cultivating barley – but Forsyth fails to note that this probably was not the primary reason (humans had a good 200,000 years or so to discover alcohol and decide the best way to make more was to settle down after all, so why didn’t they become sedentary sooner?), and that the primary reason (see Steven Mithen’s After The Ice) was probably more to do about climate change making food sources unreliable and the sudden appeal of settling down somewhere reliable and fertile like near a river – making alcohol was probably just a happy bonus.

In any case, I did like his book. It was funny, and the pacy, fluid writing style meant that it was easy to get through – I finished it in just a couple of hours, and it was a fun read. I did pick up a few miscellaneous facts here and there that I hadn’t known before.

Full of wry British humor. Fun read.