The Wet and the Dry: A Drinker’s Journey by Lawrence Osborne

(Crown, $25)

Nondrinkers and drinkers have “two very different ways of engaging with the world,” said David L. Ulin in the Los Angeles Times. For Lawrence Osborne, that simple notion represents all the excuse he needs to undertake a veritable pub crawl through the Middle East and southern Asia, bringing readers along with him as he seeks out drinks in several dry nations as well as enlightenment about the mind-set of the teetotaler natives. “Were it not for Osborne’s erudition and experience,” such a conceit “might run the risk of falling flat.” But the English novelist and travel writer is a seasoned nomad who’s comfortable with cultural differences, and his “delightfully idiosyncratic” book manages to make drinking seem, at heart, “a matter of philosophical, as opposed to hedonistic, choice.”

Osborne at times goes to great lengths for a drink, said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. When he reaches the Indonesian city of Surakarta, he ignores street posters of Osama bin Laden when he asks white-robed locals on a corner where he might get a beer. Sometimes, tense situations turn comic: In Lebanon, which does have a significant wine culture, he feels intimidated into praising a noxious wine, only to have the warlord who made it promise to send him a large bottle. Osborne argues that an interest in occasional inebriation is the mark of “a real human being.” And that’s just how he comes across—as “a complicated man mixing complicated feelings into fizzy, adult, intoxicating prose.”

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Unfortunately, he makes “an unwilling pupil,” said Barney Thompson in the Financial Times. Amid his boozy adventures, the author neglects to give the societies he encounters a fair shake: The Muslims he depicts are either fanatics or subversives who drink on the sly. “But what about the millions who do not need alcohol to enjoy themselves?” If you’re looking for “an entertaining romp through half the bars of the Middle East,” The Wet and the Dry will not disappoint. “For a genuine insight into the world of the dry, you will have to go elsewhere.”