A History of Vodka (Interverso)
``This text was never intended for publication,'' Pokhlebkin solemnly warns us in his foreword. It is pretty much downhill from there, which is something of a shame, given the intriguing premise of the book. The author notes that he undertook writing this history as a ``civic duty'' when asked by the Russian government to establish the legitimacy of the Russians' claim to the invention of vodka. It seems that in the late 1970s, a number of countries began challenging not only whether Russia was indeed vodka's homeland, but even whether the nation's distilleries had a right to use the name vodka (the Russian diminutive for water) on their bottles of the colorless spirit. ``The laws of the world capitalist market are ruthless,'' Pokhlebkin reflects, ``they take neither emotion nor tradition into account.'' While convincing on the veracity of vodka's Russian heritage (it was invented, he says, between 1440 and 1478, probably in a Moscow monastery), he is such a humorless and ponderous writer that the book becomes unintentionally funny. Vodka should be imbibed straight, and only with ``exclusively Russian national dishes,'' Pokhlebkin intones. What about cocktails? ``Cocktails are merely a means of getting drunk, not a gastronomic category,'' he sniffs, ``and in any case Russians would never abuse vodka in this fashion.'' The reader is frequently reminded of a misguided Nabokov narrator--or perhaps of Greta Garbo's Ninotchka.Copyright 1992 Cahners Business Information, Inc.