I'm not a big history buff so it took me a while to read this book. The short chapters, poignant stories and recurring themes make it an interesting and easy read. If the author showed something it's that history repeats itself! Most interesting to me was the epilogue in which he draw parallels with the American Prohibition and the War on Drugs. Fundamentally, unless social inequity is addressed, problems will always surface. ( )

This fascinating work of social history explores the infamous gin craze of the 18th century, immortalised in such sayings as "drunk for a penny, dead drunk for tuppence" and in Hogarth's famous sketch Gin Lane, probably the most famous depiction of alcoholism and social misery in British history. Many of the debates surrounding gin echoed those around prohibition in the USA in the early 20th century and around the war on drugs in many countries now; the undoubted evils that drink and drugs can cause leading to periods of prohibition v. the revenue that governments can derive from proper regulation of these substances and avoiding driving them underground. In the 18th century during the periods of prohibition of gin, gin driven underground was adulterated with turpentine, alum or sulphuric acid, just as a large part of the harm caused by drugs now is caused by adulterated versions of them obtained through illegal or semi-legal means. Then, like now, a large proportion of crime was attributed to the banned substance and it was linked in the minds of many with debates around social responsibility and family and societal breakdown, exemplified at its worst perhaps by the case of Judith Defour, who was hanged in 1734 for murdering her daughter to sell her clothes to buy a few pennies worth of gin. After the failure of outright prohibition in the middle of the century, there followed a period of much more effective regulation, with high rates of duty combined with concentration of the industry in fewer hands; this came alongside a bit of a paradigm shift in social thinking, when Parliament first started to take issues like crime and abandonment of children rather more seriously as social issues, rather than just as, respectively, threats to the natural order or as just desserts for the sins of a parent. Fascinating stuff. ( )

While I expected a general overview of gin, how it was invented, how it was/is made, its various styles, and its history, that is not what this book provides. It actually provides a social history of gin, and efforts to ban it, in England a couple hundred years ago. Still an interesting topic, with many interesting stories and people, but not as vibrant or interesting as I had hoped. If you want to learn about British efforts at prohibition long before American prohibition, and why such efforts will always fail, this is your book. If you want to learn about gin per se, it is not. My rating of this book mainly reflects my disappointment at the general information about gin that the author leaves out, which I feel would have greatly added to the book, not the thorough research and excellent writing that the author has engaged in on the topic of prohibition. ( )

http://www.engel-cox.org/text/gin_the_much_lamented_death_of.html#001391 ( )