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| The Martini: An Illustrated History of an American Classic | 
 enlarge | Author: Barnaby (with: Ogden Nash; Bernard Devoto; M. F. K. Fisher; Ernest Hemingway; Ian Fleming; Luis Bunuel; Russell Baker; Christopher Buckley) Conrad
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
Buy Used: $0.01
You Save: $24.94 (100%)
New (11) Used (88) Collectible (2) from $0.01
Avg. Customer Rating:  8 reviews
Sales Rank: 491432
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 132
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.8
Dimensions (in): 9.8 x 9.1 x 0.6
ISBN: 0811807177
Dewey Decimal Number: 641.874
EAN: 9780811807173
ASIN: 0811807177
Publication Date: April 1, 1995
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Help save a tree. Buy all your used books from Green Earth Books. Read -> Recycle -> Reuse!
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
The martini was and still is more than just a cocktail. This first-of-its-kind book serves up a fabulous cocktail of martini-inspired art, cartoons, collectibles, advertisements, and film stills that reveal how deeply this classic has permeated every aspect of American culture. 150 illustrations, many in color.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 3 more reviews...
 Read it and sip June 27, 2008
This book is the perfect complement to martini hour. It's filled with interesting historical tidbits, quotes, and photos of famous martini drinkers and the beverage in question. It's a great gift for any martini fan.
 Pleasant enough January 30, 2006
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
A coffee table book, defined as one where the picture to text ratio is 1:1 or greater. That doesn't diminish the collection of text and images that Barnaby Conrad has put together in this slim volume, but as an exhaustive work on the mixture of gin and vermouth garnished with an olive this is not. Conrad does manage to bring together some things that I hadn't seen or read before in my cocktail explorations, including a very dry (heh heh) bit of humor from Christopher Buckley on a presidential debate between George "Pappy" Bush and Bill Clinton called "The Three Martini Debate," derived from a Tom Brokaw quote in The New York Times that serving the two a martini and having an exchange at his house would be a good alternative format. None of the pictures made my list of favorites, although the old advertisements and movie stills were interesting, and the cartoons, mainly from The New Yorker, were fun. Only two poems, one of which I was already intimately familiar with (the Dorothy Parker), but the other was one which I will endeavor to memorize, Ogden Nash's "A Drink with Something In It."
The single thing that I learned about the cocktail itself from the book was that the original recipe called for orange bitters in a 2:1 gin and vermouth combination. Since I actually have a bottle or orange bitters after having searched for a year for one, I can give this a try.
WELL DONE! February 6, 2003
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
This book is great--it has history, humor, and lots of glamorous pictures, and manages to keep the cheese factor very low. A great gift for the drinkers in your life!
Breezy, well-written look at a cultural phenomenon November 17, 2001
6 out of 10 found this review helpful
Now HERE is a hip coffee-table book. It's true that it isn't as colorful (or fundamentally healthy in subject) as Drew Kampion's "Stoked: A History of Surf Culture" (ISBN 1575440628). Nor as vividly gothic as David King's "The Commissar Vanishes," containing photographs re-touched during the Stalin regime so that unpersons might become unremembered, while the old women with the thick glasses and awkward sheaves of the forbidden-book registry (updated monthly) made the rounds of the bookshops and libraries to preen the inventory (ISBN 0805052941). Nor again is it as deeply, internationally hip as Conrad's earlier "Absinthe: History in a Bottle" (1988, reprinted 1997, ISBN 0811816508). As a European-emigre acquaintance recalled, for example: "It was 1950, we had just been married, we were driving through this little town in Switzerland. It was a Sunday after church, and the place seemed deserted. But there was a large inn, where we stopped. Most of the town was there, having a glass of wine. There was also a little private room, and the local leaders were there, the mayor, the bishop, the chief of police, and the innkeeper, who had come out to see who we were. While the rest of the people were having a glass of wine, they were off to themselves, having an absinthe, a little furtively. All perfectly illegal, and totally charming. I made a witty remark about this, a little off-color. The bishop laughed heartily, and they welcomed us in and gave us each an absinthe and toasted our marriage." (See also my separate recommendation posted for the Conrad "Absinthe.")These are all interesting coffee-table books, and they all deal with some kind of history. But none of the others starts with lines like "I must get out of these wet clothes and into a dry Martini." Conrad's Martini book is the most US-pop-culture-hip of this bunch. It is light-hearted and loaded with trivia, from old magazine advertisements to collectible cocktail shakers to an unforgettable movie photo on page 53 of Joan Crawford in high-contrast black-and-white, Martini in one hand, cigarette in the other. It is an instructive history as well as a very funny narrative. By the late 1970s the Martini was dying out, as Conrad mentions; it was unhip, old-fashioned. By 1990 (Conrad doesn't mention but I do) a character in Eric Kraft's contemporary novel "Reservations Recommended" (ISBN 0517572338) was so out-of-it that he "ordered a martini without irony." You wouldn't have guessed it by the late 1990s when a suburban Crate-and-Barrel store was selling seemingly little else but Martini glasses and 1930s-reproduction cocktail shakers, and the Libbey Glass website offered numerous Martini models including with Z-stems. The Martini did not stay unhip for long.
The quintissential American cocktail, in all it's glory. July 19, 2000
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
This beautiful "coffee table" style book is dedicated to that most beautiful and perfect of cocktails, the inestimable martini.Conrad's informative text, colorful anecdotes, and lavish illustrations make this book a wonderful addition to the great miracle it celebrates. Mix yourself a martini, (two olives, shaken -- not stirred) relax in an easy chair, and enjoy this book!
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