Gin tastes like Christmas to some and rotten pine chips to others, but nearly everyone familiar with the spirit holds immediate gin nostalgia.

Although early medical textbooks treated it as a healing agent, early alchemists (as well as their critics) claimed gin's base was a path to immortality-and also Satan's tool. In more recent times, the gin trade consolidated the commercial and political power of nations and prompted a social campaign against women. Gin has been used successfully as a defense for murder; blamed for massive unrest in 18th-century England; and advertised for as an abortifacient.

From its harshest proto-gin distillation days to the current smooth craft models, gin plays a powerful cultural role in film, music, and literature-one that is arguably older, broader, and more complex than any other spirit.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

Author: Shonna Milliken Humphrey
Editors: Christopher Schaberg / Ian Bogost
Series: Object Lessons
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Pages: 160pp
Size: 5 x 7.5
Notes: paperback
Release Date: November 12, 2020
ISBN: 978-1501353277