A Short History of Drunkenness: How, Why, Where, and When Humankind Has Gotten Merry from the Stone Age to the Present

by Mark Forsyth Narrated by Simon Vance

Overview

From the internationally bestselling author of The Etymologicon, a lively and fascinating exploration of how, throughout history, each civilization has found a way to celebrate, or to control, the eternal human drive to get sloshed



Almost every culture on earth has drink, and where there's drink there's drunkenness. But in every age and in every place drunkenness is a little bit different. It can be religious, it can be sexual, it can be the duty of kings or the relief of peasants. It can be an offering to the ancestors, or a way of marking the end of a day's work. It can send you to sleep, or send you into battle.



Making stops all over the world, A Short History of Drunkenness traces humankind's love affair with booze from our primate ancestors through to the twentieth century, answering every possible question along the way: What did people drink? How much? Who did the drinking? Of the many possible reasons, why? On the way, learn about the Neolithic Shamans, who drank to communicate with the spirit world (no pun intended), marvel at how Greeks got giddy and Sumerians got sauced, and find out how bars in the Wild West were never quite like in the movies.



This is a history of the world at its inebriated best.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times Book Review - Tony Perrottet

The pleasure of the micro-history is the chance to view the complex chaos of the past through a narrow lens. In A Short History of Drunkenness, Mark Forsyth takes the tendency to endearing extremes: The very origin of the species, he reports, comes down to our love for hooch…A little hyperbole is all part of the fun on this entertaining bar-hop through the past 10,000 years. The tone evokes a cheeky Oxford professor regaling us over a pint of stout in the pub, and Forsyth revels in his Britishisms as much as any P. G. Wodehouse character…But there is always some serious history slipped in with the joking. Almost every human society, Forsyth shows, has created an elaborate web of rules around drinking and drunkenness. Even Attila the Hun had strict protocol at his feasts, with guests toasting one another in order of rank. And those taboos and rituals reveal a great deal about the broader culture.

Publishers Weekly

03/05/2018
Etymologist Forsyth (The Etymologicon) presents an entertaining jaunt through intoxication over the ages, from prehistoric times to Prohibition, with equal parts enlightening data and delightful color commentary. He takes readers on a tour of an ancient Sumerian tavern (where the law dictated that bartenders failing to give correct change would be executed), and elucidates the differences between inns, taverns, and alehouses in medieval London. He explores religious and cultural rituals related to drinking over the ages, including ancient Egypt’s orgiastic Festival of Drunkenness, the Greek symposium, and the Roman convivium, where one’s designated seat at the table spoke volumes about one’s social status. Forsyth quotes literary sources extensively, including The Epic of Gilgamesh, Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales, and Animal Farm, as well as both the Old and New Testaments. While some of the material covered will be familiar, Forsyth also includes some lesser-known details, like the provenance of the phrase “Dutch courage” and the history of the British “Rum Corps” in Australia. Forsyth’s clever sense of humor and flair for perceiving subtle historical ironies make for livelier and more amusing reading than any cold recitation of facts. (May)

From the Publisher

This refreshingly guilt-free account of getting sloshed through the ages is a gift to the chalkboard-writers of dive bars the world over, laced as it is with inspirational quotes about the joys of a sniffer.”—The New York Times Book Review

“A light-hearted tour . . . Mr. Forsyth has filled a cabinet with drinking curiosities, which plays to the author’s strengths . . . His breezy style does offer another tangible benefit for the American reader: It is strewn with the shiny baubles of Britishisms related to drink: whiffled, piss-up, squiffy, trolleyed, sozzled and foozled.”—Wall Street Journal

“Hilarious and essential.”—Financial Times

“Wildly entertaining.”—Dallas Observer

“Mark Forsyth has done a sterling job . . . This is a book of some brilliance—probably best consumed with a restorative glass of something by your side.”—Daily Mail

“[With] insightful nuggets of pop-culture history . . . Forsyth, a word addict, writes a bit like the late Kingsley Amis . . . Good fun for tipplers.”—Booklist 

“This entertaining study of drunkenness makes for a racy sprint through human history. . . . Thought-provoking.”—Sunday Times

“Mark Forsyth has enormous fun breezing through 10,000 years of alcoholic history in a little more than 250 pages.”—The Guardian

“Forsyth’s jokes are snappy and well-delivered [and his] writing is charged with energy.”—Mail on Sunday
 
“Forsyth uses charm and wit to breathe life into the booze-soaked sexual rites of the Ancient Egyptians, the sozzled symposiums that inspired great thinkers like Socrates, and, more recently, the rampant rise of saloon culture in the Wild West.”—Eastern Daily Press

“Well researched and recounted with excellent humor . . . [A] delightful romp.”—Daily Express

“An entertaining look back at intoxication and inebriation around the world . . . a brief, sometimes bawdy affair, spiked with trivia.”—History Revealed

“A jaunty look at what booze has done to civilization.”—The Times Saturday Review

“A highly successful blend of the entertaining and the informative.”—The Spectator

“A light-hearted booze cruise through the ages.”—The Tablet

Kirkus Reviews

2018-03-19
A popular history of getting soused.Language historian Forsyth (The Elements of Eloquence, 2014, etc.) assembles a brisk, witty, and roughly chronological précis on drinking cultures and practices around the world since the earliest fizzle of fermentation. Using humor to skim over the violence and sadness of alcohol abuse, the author specializes in snappy summaries and choice anecdotes about the weird and obsessive customs that people have created around the process of getting drunk, with more snark reserved for the teetotalers than the tipplers. Take the ancient Egyptians, who felt it their holy duty to imbibe and cavort to excess, one of many cultures that used alcohol as a means to spiritual elevation. While his coverage can be glib and occasionally unbalanced—he waxes on about Shakespeare's relationship to wine but distills millennia of Middle Eastern intoxication into the quip that, "For a Muslim, drinking is rarely simple"—Forsyth's rollicking sketches belie the extensive research that informs them. He offers a solidly embedded history, zooming in on the spaces and objects that have enabled and embodied inebriation across the ages. As with his work in etymology, this book showcases Forsyth's ability to make sense of the court records, wine songs, and snatches of poetry he finds in the textual slag heap. Not surprisingly, much of the story is bound up in religion and the law, and he leverages the anthropological distinction between "wet" and "dry" societies to explain, among other things, the close relationship between prohibitive legislation and widespread drunkenness. Forsyth's account is as ribald and casual as that of a teenage tour guide working for tips, but it's full of good history and good humor. This smart and satisfying generalist history will make you wish the author would sum up every other subject while you bob along the waves of his irreverent, learned wit (preferably with a drink in hand).The ideal companion for an idle hour, like one spent in an airport bar.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170548378
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	09/30/2018
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected copy proof*** Copyright © 2018 Mark Forsyth
I’m afraid that I don’t really know what drunkenness is.

That may seem an odd confession for a fellow who’s about to write a history of drunkenness, but, to be honest, if authors were to let a trifling thing like ignorance stop them from writing, the bookshops would be empty. Any- way, I do have some idea. I have been conducting extensive empirical investigations on drunkenness ever since the tender age of fourteen. In many ways, I like to think of myself as being a sort of latter-day St. Augustine who asked, “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.” Substitute the word drunkenness for time and you pretty much have my saintly position.

I’m aware of some basic medical facts. A couple of gin and tonics will impair your reflexes; a dozen or so will reacquaint you with your lunch and make it difficult to stand up, and an uncertain number, which I am unwilling to investigate, will kill you. But that’s not what we know (in an Augustinian way) drunkenness is. Certainly, if an alien knocked on my door and asked why people across this peculiar planet keep drinking alcohol, I wouldn’t answer, “Oh, that’s just to impair our reflexes. It’s basically to stop us getting too good at Ping-Pong.”

There’s another canard which is usually trotted out at this point, that alcohol lowers your inhibitions. Nothing could be further from the truth. I do all sorts of things when I’m squiffy that I never wanted to do when sober. I can talk for hours to people that, sober, I would consider tedious. I recall once leaning out of the window of a flat in Camden Town waving a crucifix about and telling passersby to repent. This isn’t something that I long to do when sober but just don’t have the nerve for.

Anyway, some of alcohol’s effects are not caused by alcohol. It’s terribly easy to hand out nonalcoholic beer without telling people that it contains no alcohol. You then watch them drink and take notes. Sociologists do this all the time, and the results are consistent and conclusive. First, you can’t trust a sociologist at the bar; they must be watched like hawks. Second, if you come from a culture where alcohol is meant to make you aggressive, you get aggressive. If you come from a culture where it’s meant to make you religious, you become religious. You can even change this from drinking session to drinking session. If the devious sociologist announces that they’re investigating liquor and libido, everyone gets libidinous; if they say it’s about song, everyone suddenly bursts out singing.

People even alter their behavior depending on what species of booze they think they’re imbibing. Even though the active ingredient—ethanol—is identical, people will alter their behavior depending on the origins and cultural associations of the tipple in question. English people are very likely to get aggressive after a few pints of lager, but give them wine—which is associated with poshness and France—and they will become demure, urbane and, in serious cases, sprout a beret. There’s a reason we have lager- louts but not vermouth-vandals or Campari-contrarians.

Some people get very angry when you tell them this. They insist that alcohol causes whatever it is that they don’t like—let’s say violence. If you point out that cultures where alcohol is banned are still violent, they harrumph. If I point out, which I can, that I drink an awful lot more than most, but that I haven’t hit anyone since the age of about eight (before intoxicating liquors had ever touched my pacific lips), they say, “Well, yes, but what about other people?” It’s always other people, damn them—other people are hell. But most people are able to drink all evening at a nice dinner party without once stabbing the guest on their right.

And, in the unlikely event that you were suddenly transported to another time and place, an Ancient Egyptian would probably be very surprised that you weren’t drinking to receive a vision of the lion-headed goddess Hathor—I thought everyone did that. And a Neolithic shaman would wonder why you weren’t communicating with the ancestors. A Suri of Ethiopia would probably ask why you hadn’t started work yet. That’s what Suri people do when they drink; as the saying goes, “Where there is no beer, there is no work.” Just as an incidental technical point, this is called transitional drinking: drinking to mark the transition from one bit of the day to the other. In England we drink because we’ve finished working, the Suri drink because they’ve started.

To put this all another way, when Margaret Thatcher died she was not buried with all her wineglasses and a corner-shop’s worth of booze. We think this normal. In fact, we’d think it odd if she had been. But we are the odd ones, we’re the weirdos, we’re the eccentrics. For most of known human history political leaders have been buried with all things needful for a good postmortem piss-up. That goes all the way back to King Midas, to Proto- Dynastic Egypt, to the shamans of Ancient China and, of bloody course, to the Vikings. Even those who have long stopped breathing like to get trolleyed now and then— just ask the Tiriki tribe of Kenya, who go and pour beer onto their ancestors’ graves just in case.

Drunkenness is near universal. Almost every culture in the world has booze. The only ones that weren’t too keen—North America and Australia—have been colonized by those who were. And at every time and in every place, drunkenness is a different thing. It’s a celebration, a ritual, an excuse to hit people, a way of making decisions or ratifying contracts, and a thousand other peculiar practices. When the Ancient Persians had a big political decision to make they would debate the matter twice: once drunk, and once sober. If they came to the same conclusion both times, they acted.

That is what this book is about. It’s not about alcohol per se, it’s about drunkenness: its pitfalls and its gods. From Ninkasi, the Sumerian goddess of beer, to the 400 drunken rabbits of Mexico.

A couple of points should be made before we set off. First, this is a short history. A complete history of drunkenness would be a complete history of humanity and require much too much paper. Instead, I have decided to pick certain points in history to see how people went about getting sozzled. What was it actually like in a Wild West saloon, or a medieval English alehouse, or a Greek symposium? When an Ancient Egyptian girl wanted to go out on the lash what exactly did she do? Of course, each evening is different, but it’s possible to get a good, if hazy, notion.

History books like to tell us that so-and-so was drunk, but they don’t explain the minutiae of drinking. Where was it done? With whom? At what time of day? Drinking has always been surrounded by rules, but they rarely get written down. In present-day Britain, for example, though there is no law in place, absolutely everybody knows that you must not drink before noon, except, for some reason, in airports and at cricket matches.

But in the middle of the rules is unruly drunkenness. The anarchist at the cocktail party. She (I think it’s a she, deities of drink usually are) is the one I want to watch. Ideally, I’d like to arrest her and take her mugshot, but I’m not sure it’s possible. At least then, when that curious alien asked me what drunkenness was, I would have something to show.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "A Short History of Drunkenness"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Mark Forsyth.
Excerpted by permission of Crown/Archetype.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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