I’VE READ THIS BOOK. THE REVIEW IS A BIT HARSHER THAN I WOULD HAVE BEEN, BUT BASICALLY FAIR: REVIEW: ‘Girly Drinks: A World History of Women and Alcohol.’ “Girly Drinks: A World History of Women and Alcohol should be interesting. After all, it’s about girls and booze, possibly the most interesting combination of all time. But through some kind of reverse alchemy, O’Meara took 25,000 years’ worth of information on women and alcohol and made it boring. . . . Nowhere is O’Meara’s feminist critique more inconsistently applied than in her discussions of actual girly drinks, which she returns to even after dismissing the idea on page two. She bemoans the fact that women are expected to order ‘cloyingly sweet, fizzy drinks,’ but later shows that all the landmark girly drinks she names… were invented by women.”

There’s a fair amount of interesting stuff, but it’s largely spoiled by the big helpings of you-go-girl feminism interspersed with actual man-bashing.