"Someone walks into a bar and orders a cocktail, its purpose is to get drunk, and, perhaps, get you drunk. But how you get drunk, what cocktail you order, matters. The Shaken and the Stirred brilliantly shows, each cocktail side by side on the menu here and now gestures to other times, places, worlds, real and imaginary.  The essays here decode a cocktail menu into a cultural history of North America. This volume shows how the otherworldly charm and significance of each cocktail emanates from its mythic origins, the way each drink opposes some other drink of another place or another generation, the way drinks recall the charismatic figures who drink them, or the times and places from which they emerged. Drinks are good to think as well as drink. You drink them not simply to get drunk, but, like the eucharist, to imbibe, participate in, these other worlds."

Someone walks into a bar and orders a cocktail, its purpose is to get drunk, and, perhaps, get you drunk. But how you get drunk, what cocktail you order, matters. The Shaken and the Stirred brilliantly shows, each cocktail side by side on the menu here and now gestures to other times, places, worlds, real and imaginary.  The essays here decode a cocktail menu into a cultural history of North America. This volume shows how the otherworldly charm and significance of each cocktail emanates from its mythic origins, the way each drink opposes some other drink of another place or another generation, the way drinks recall the charismatic figures who drink them, or the times and places from which they emerged. Drinks are good to think as well as drink. You drink them not simply to get drunk, but, like the eucharist, to imbibe, participate in, these other worlds.

The cocktail is a thing to drink and also to talk about. The twenty essays in this collection are at the high end of the talk. The authors are distinguished in their various fields and bring historical and theoretical sophistication to their surprisingly varied takes on the subject.