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27 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Contains about 10% alocohol, 3 Feb 2004
Other reviewers have pointed out that this is a real mish-mash of a book and I would go along with that. If you are buying this book with a view to having a ready-made guide to whisky-making in Scotland, don't. On this level it fails miserably and the reader would be far better buying one of the many cheaper pocket guides to whisky that are on the market. Banks describes the whisky making process in about half a dozen pages in the middle of an unrelated chapter, while the details of his whisky tasting sessions are strewn at irregular intervals throughout the book. The lack of an index makes it difficult to locate his views on a particular whisky. All in all, the parts of this book dealing with whisky amount to about 30 - 40 pages mixed inside a 350 page book.So what else do you get for your money? Well, you get a little autobiographical detail about Banks. As a fan of (most) of his other books I found this quite interesting. Others not familiar with Banks himself may not find this information as entertaining.
You also get various random anecdotes about Banks' friends which sometimes verge on the self-indulgent. There are several tales that I'm sure are of interest to them and them alone. You also get Banks' commentary on contemporary events. Chiefly, you get his views on the war in Iraq. Briefly, Banks was against it and becomes extremely repetitive when referring to it. You also get a LOT of incredibly dull stuff about cars, but that is nothing compared to the mind-numbing tedium that accompanies his seemingly endless details about Scottish roads. This book has page after page of utterly pointless information about just about every road north of Glasgow and in these sections is, quite frankly, unreadable. In summary - as a book about whisky it is less than adequate, as an autobiography it is patchy, as social commentary it is repetitive, as a trevelogue it is dull, dull, dull.
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by Iain Banks
by Andrew Jefford
by Iain M. Banks
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