Book Review: American Still Life

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Book Review: American Still Life

Unread postby bourbonv » Thu May 05, 2005 6:54 pm

American Still Life, by F. Paul Pecult. Hoboken, N.J.:John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2003, Contents, Forward, Appendices, Bibliography, Index, Illustrated, pp. 240.

This book is a prime example of what a marketing company wants from a corperate history. Lots of plugs for the company and the brands. With that said, the book still has many saving graces, just not in the first half of the book.

The early chapters have very little real history of the Beam family and the author tries to cover for this lack of documentation by placing the Beams in with the larger picture of what was going on in Kentucky's distilling history. The problem is the author does not know that much about the history and simply uses the same old marketing stories that have been used for years. He tells the reader that the distillers from the western part of Pennsylvania came to Kentucky to escape the whiskey rebellion, but does not consider that there is very little evidence that that ever happened. After all the tax was in Kentucky as well as Pennsylvania, so why should they pack up to come to the same conditions? Land is another problem. The land of Kentucky was spoken for by veterans of the Virginia militia during the American Revolution, so these distillers would have to purchase this land from someone already in Kentucky or Virginia. He also makes a point of calling the first Beam Bourbon "Old Jake Beam Sour Mash" and then in a side bar claims that James Crow invented Sour Mash. Crow was not in Kentucky until about the time of Jake Beam's death. He paints a picture of Kentucky women as being homebound without ever travelling past the nearest town and not involved in such things as distilling. This is not true as there are many examples of women in frontier Kentucky travelling back to there family homes in the east for visits and one of the earliest documents mentioning "Sour Mash" is from a woman distiller in 1818. The examples of the author's lack of historical knowledge continue through the first three chapters. The reader can all the information in them much more quickly by looking in the second appendix which is a time line of the Beam Family.

The second half of the book is a much better book. Pecult obviously had much better sources of information as the people being discussed were either still living, or in the memory of those still living. This part of the book is much better written and more informative. The story as to how "Booker's" bourbon came about is very informative. Even so there is still the marketing element there as they down play the "Single Barrel" concept and put more emphasis on the "Small Batch" concept. The truth is both are about equally important in the rebirth of interest in bourbon. The chapter about the "Other Beam's" is also very interesting and the author does have the grace to acknowledge the source of his information, Jo Ann Beam. She did a great job of researching her family and deserves all the credit he gives and more.

The book ends with Pecults tasting notes and ratings of the Beam bourbons and a timeline for the family. The photographs are all placed in the center pages of the book with many good shots of the family members, focusing mostly on Jim Beam and Booker Noe.

The book is a good one for a bourbon library because of the information about post prohibition Beam.

Mike Veach
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Unread postby Strayed » Sat May 07, 2005 1:03 am

I bought Paul Pacult's book at one of Fred Noe's Small Batch Bourbon tastings. I would have paid less at any of the chain bookstores, but Paul was scheduled to be there to sign copies and I thought that would be nice. The books were sold prior to the beginning of the tasting, which began by noting that Pacult would not be attending.

I later emailed Mr. Pacult with a few questions and his reply, in its entirety, was "Whatever I discovered is in the book".
At that point about the only thing I wanted to discover was whether I could get my money back.
=JOHN= (the "Jaye" part of "L & J dot com")
http://www.ellenjaye.com
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Unread postby bunghole » Sat May 07, 2005 11:47 am

Well we all know what the "F" stands for and it rhymes with muckhead! :twisted:
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Unread postby bourbonv » Sat May 07, 2005 1:52 pm

I thought the Beam's deserved better.

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