“Proof: The Science of Booze” is a wonderfully fun read about alcohol in it’s every context. Wired writer/editor and Übergeek journalist Adam Rogers has a contagious passion for the study of booze in whatever incarnation that study might manifest. He examines the history, the industry and marketing, and the science, all with the same alert enthusiasm. The entire book reads like one of the better articles one might expect to find in a publication like Wired, with a little less of the ephemeral chasing of the advertising dollar that seems to be endemic in magazine writing these days. It’s not high literature and there’s nothing to cheer on in the prose, but everything is solid and nothing is aesthetically offensive enough to break you out of the read.
These kind of books are tough to talk about. There’s nothing artistically redeeming here, nothing on a level of creative power that edifies the reader through its expression, which is what I generally turn to literature for, but it’s damn interesting and I learned a lot from it, which is absolutely one of the things I read books for. I guess that’s the metric. Not everything has to be Tinkers, for Chrissakes.
Recommendation: Read if you are intrigued by the idea of a good book on the topic. Skip it if that doesn’t sound like your glass of scotch.
