Tropical Bar Book: Drinks & Stories

Aficionados of rum drinks will relish this book, an unusual blend of historical sketches about rum, recommended basic necessities for the tropical bar, alcohol-inspired short stories and 152 recipes. Most of the last are based on rum, but a sprinkling of drinks using tequila, mescal or cachaca is included. Everyone will recognize a few of the 152 (all of which sound worth testing at least once)--but more are novel, collected from tiny, tin-roofed, palm-shaded tabernas on the Caribbean islands or invented by the author. The stories by Ernest Hemingway (``Daiquiris''), Jane Bowles (``Punch and Profit''), Malcolm Lowry and others, set in the tropics and peppered with bars and bordellos, are not necessarily these writers' best work; some are grim, rather at odds with a book implying the joys of a fruit-filled rum drink. But Mattei's full-color illustrations are provocatively lush, delicately mythic and pleasantly unsettling. (June)