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A review by luisvilla
Smuggler's Cove: Exotic Cocktails, Rum, and the Cult of Tiki by Rebecca Cate, Martin Cate
4.0
As a cocktail book, this is amazing: tasty recipes, great history, amazing photography, and great education about rum. Can't recommend enough.
The only reason I didn't give it five stars is because it also wants to be a book about escapism by way of "tiki", and escapism is a really loaded topic here in 2019, particularly escapism by way of return to the '50s and a fantasy of brown places just without the brown people. The book doesn't deny that those are issues, but it does not spend a lot of time grappling with it after the initial acknowledgement. Probably that's OK - it is a cocktail book, not a history of colonialism. But I wish it had tried harder in this area.
The only reason I didn't give it five stars is because it also wants to be a book about escapism by way of "tiki", and escapism is a really loaded topic here in 2019, particularly escapism by way of return to the '50s and a fantasy of brown places just without the brown people. The book doesn't deny that those are issues, but it does not spend a lot of time grappling with it after the initial acknowledgement. Probably that's OK - it is a cocktail book, not a history of colonialism. But I wish it had tried harder in this area.