PositiveThe Wall Street JournalMark Forsyth’s A Short History of Drunkenness is a light-hearted tour. Mr. Forsyth, a British journalist and blogger, takes his readers on a fast and furious ride, often deviating from the perpendicular to the horizontal, sallying from Sumerian and Egyptian drinking then on and on ... For a history of drunkenness, this book contains surprisingly few scenes of debauchery, but this also might be for the best. Rather, Mr. Forsyth has filled a cabinet of drinking curiosities, which plays to the author’s strength ... Mr. Forsyth often resorts to a cartoonish rendering of history, which is probably unavoidable when covering a span of history from the stone age to last night in a little over 200 small-format pages ... His breezy style does offer another tangible benefit.
