His profiles of rum-based cocktails (with an all-important appendix of recipes) serve as starting points for excursions on such topics as slavery in the West Indies, the temperance movement, Ernest Hemingway's epic daiquiri binges and the rise and fall of the tiki bar. Curtis's grander pronouncements ("Rum embodies America's laissez-faire attitude: It is whatever it wants to be")are true only in the groggiest sense, but readers who come along on this charming barhop through cultural history will toast them nonetheless.
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Background Information
Ernest Hemingway was an American writer who gained fame describing Paris of the Roaring Twenties and the Spanish Civil War. Laissez Faire, from a French expression meaning "to allow to make," invovles the premise that the best government involvement in the economy is none.