Bøger af Mike Gerrard

Behind Bars is filled with stories both ancient and urgent of what happens when alcohol meets crime, from illicit stills in the Scottish Highlands to moonshine in the USA, rum smuggled by Caribbean pirates, the roaring times of Prohibition, to current-day gangs selling millions of dollars' worth of fake Bordeaux and the often-unsolved cases of people walking into a liquor store, stealing whiskey bottles worth tens of thousands of dollars, and walking out, never to be seen again.Award-winning travel and drinks writer Mike Gerrard takes readers on a centuries-long journey highlighting the most bizarre - and expensive - alcohol-related crimes all while revealing the inside world of booze: how it has been distilled, legislated, imbibed, and infused into culture and society for hundreds of years. Discover the evolution of the world-leading whiskey industry in Scotland; how the war in Ukraine has impacted illicit vodka rings; how Southern smugglers laid the foundation for NASCAR; and the machinations behind the Whiskey Ring Scandal, a White-House Prohibition conspiracy involving high-ranking American officials under President Grant.These crimes have not died with Prohibition. In 2018 at the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre scientists used radiocarbon-dating techniques to examine fifty-five bottles of rare and expensive Scotch whiskies. Twenty-one of them were found to be fake. Gerrard interviews today's leading experts that employ cutting-edge testing techniques to investigate suspect bottles of rare and high-priced alcohol. Fake booze goes back even further than that. Archaeologists excavating around Pompeii in Campania, Italy, a region whose wine was much sought-after and expensive, have uncovered evidence that local wine merchants were filling amphorae with wine from other parts of Italy and passing it off as the real thing. Behind Bars smartly and swiftly shows that the link between alcohol and crime is a never-ending story.

Mike Gerrard's travel writing has won awards in the UK and USA, and been published in The Times, Time Out, The Washington Post, Wanderlust, The Independent on Sunday, The Express, The Sydney Sun-Herald, The Guardian, and many other publications. In this collection of his travel writing, his award-winning pieces about eating snake in China, taking a taxi ride through troubled Belfast, and walking the hair-raising levadas of Madeira are all included. Also here are other evocative accounts of his experiences: * camel-trekking in the Sinai Desert * helping to drink a bar dry in Guyana * dodging orangutan dung in Sumatra * canoeing in Venezuela's Orinoco Delta * touring Paris at night on a bike * discovering Viking toilet habits * going to a country that doesn't exist And capturing the atmosphere of Jamaica, the South Pacific, Armenia, Georgia, Guatemala, Mexico, and Athens in these 56 travel pieces, amounting to 71,000 words over 250 pages. Julia-Jean Andrews on Smashwords: "I've always enjoyed a good travel book and this is one of the best. You can dip into individual chapters and let Mike Gerrard take you around the world. I also enjoyed how Mike describes the various local foods...Well...Apart from the snake!" And from 5-star reviews in the Amazon UK store: By Andrew (London) - A wonderfully varied array of trips and holidays come vividly to life in this collection. They cover the world and include a whole spectrum of contrasting places and experiences. Mike Gerrard writes about all of them with compassion, humour and insight from his own first-hand knowledge. The writing is a real pleasure to read, too. By Kate Nivison (London) - I would thoroughly recommend Mike Gerrard's 'Snakes Alive' collection of his own lively and much-published travel features to anyone who would love to travel more, or wants to write about their own experience. Many of the pieces are object lessons in how to capture the spirit of a place without hype or exaggeration, in an accessible and fluent style. As well as inspiration, there are also plenty of down-to-earth details for the would-be traveller. As a travel writer myself, (Travelling Light: Short Stories & Travel Writing to Take You Away From it All ) and where my own travels have corresponded with Mike Gerrard's (Sinai, Jamaica, France . . .) I found myself nodding and smiling at the truth of his observations.

"Cask Strength tells the story of the unsung hero of the world of spirits, wine, and beer and an invention as ancient and important as the wheel-the humble barrel"--