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

Nondrinkers and drinkers have “two very different ways of engaging with the world.”

(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.”

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