A short book “review.” Imagine that.
Why I stopped reading Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer on page 10:
The lake itself could not be seen from the Chestnut ridge, thanks to the sharp ascent of the Milwaukee’s eastern bank. But when Phillip [Best] climbed the steep bluff that hugged the lake’s edge, he marveled at the vast sheet of rippling gray silk that stretched as far as the eye could see. Here and there, jagged tripods of canvas-draped uprights sliced the horizon.
Ten pages like this was all I could stand. And it goes on in this vein for the rest of the book (that I could tell; I was skipping through it in ever larger chunks). I understand the desire to “bring the past to life with intricate descriptions” but man, an editor would have been handy.
I happen to like this sort of economic-history-of-America-organized-around-a-single-industry. Recently I read And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails and enjoyed it thoroughly. It’s a completely different writing style, perhaps one more suited to my taste, but the author didn’t spend a lot of time telling me stuff he had no way of knowing to be true.
Ambitious Brew has some good reviews on Amazon.com, and at least one suggested that the book starts slowly. I guess I just don’t have the abiding interest in the topic to wade through the first part to get to the “good stuff.” Given what I saw of the later writing, I’m not so sure that I ever would have had the right kind of interest.
