feedFermenting Revolution [Review]
My review of Fermenting Revolution appears in OutThere Monthly today, so here I am reposting it on my weblog of joy because, well, I don't know how many peoloe actually visit the OutThere Monthly neighborhood of the internets. Blessings.
Fermenting Revolution: How to Drink Beer and Save the World
Christopher Mark O'Brien
New Society Publishers, 2006, 288 pages.
You might expect that a book claiming that drinking beer has the power to save the world might fail to convince, and so long as we're talking about the book titled Fermenting Revolution: How to Drink Beer and Save the World by Christopher Mark O'Brien, you would be right.
But hold on. At the very least, this is a book about drinking beer. And maybe, if the author's gifts of rhetoric are extremely strong, by the end of the book I'll be able to stop leafleting my neighbors and writing my congress-persons because all I really gotta do is drink more beer and peace will be had, starvation will cease, congress will hold hands and sing Kumbaya.
Sorry if I sound flip. But Fermenting Revolution is flip. It takes care to tell us that choosing, drinking and making beer is serious business, while at the same time sounding a little bit like your college roomate who still calls you "dooood." And spells it that way too.Perhaps a larger problem is that the book has no identity and never really gets to the point of convincing me of anything except "beer is good, and small-batch beer (especially if made and/or drunk by women) is better." Beginning with a religious history of beer, the book manages to offend even the most stalwart of religious sensibilities (namely, mine). That isn't a good place to start, poorly equating beer with God, and the books rhetorical prowess only grows slightly beyond that. The continuing chapters just barely hang together, and rather than attempt to make a point more profound than "drink beer!"-Mr. O'Brien settles into a kind of blog-entry style better for periodic guzzling than prolonged sipping. Furthermore, the buzz is short-lived-if there is one at all-and leaves me wondering where I left my coat.
Blog-entry tidbits of beer trivia hardly make for a book worth buying. I suppose Fermenting Revolution would make a decent gift for the un-enlightened, but then again, so would a case of mixed microbrews. Me? I recommend the latter.
technorati tags:fermentingrevolution, fermenting, revolution, book, review, outthere, outtheremonthly, republication
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