Book Review: Moonshine
By Richard Thomas
In what one pundit called “The Golden Age of Whiskey Books,” moonshine has been getting a disproportionate amount of attention. I imagine this is because illicit liquor-making makes for such good non-fiction storytelling, and just maybe the hipster chic that attached itself to moonshine several years ago helps just a bit too.
Yet most books on the subject take the angle of moonshining in a particular place or detail the technical process of actually making corn whiskey. In Moonshine: A Cultural History of America’s Infamous Liquor, Time, Inc. Editor Jaime Joyce offers a broader perspective.
Joyce’s Moonshine provides a primer on the making of illegal whiskey in America, and in so doing spins an entertaining yarn that will have nuggets for most every whiskey nerd to digest. While most whiskey fans don’t need to be told about The Whiskey Rebellion, they might not know the extent of 19th Century illegal whiskey-making in urban centers like Philadelphia and New York. Those looking for tales of backwoods, Southern moonshining and bootlegging will enjoy the look at Franklin County, Virginia, at one time referred to as the Moonshine Capital of the World. Either way they should enjoy the way Joyce tells the reader about it.
Beyond the people, places and dates, Joyce also delves into moonshine’s place in American entertainment, and how it has provided fodder for songs, television and films. Also covered is the restoration of legal moonshine brought about by the micro-distilling movement, a category that hasn’t existed since before liquor taxes were revived to help pay for the Civil War. In particular the reader is treated to pleasant segments with Dawsonville Moonshine Distillery in Georgia and Dark Corner in South Carolina.
Moonshine is not a weighty history of underground and backwoods distilling, but it is the kind of engaging work that easily succeeds in entertaining while informing. I imagine anyone who reads it, no matter how well-versed on the subject, will come away having discovered something new, while anyone with an interest in white lightning will delight in the easy reading on a favorite subject.
