The Wall Street Journal has a piece on the top five books on alcohol, and Lowell Edmunds’ Martini book is there … inter alia:

5. Martini, Straight Up

By Lowell Edmunds

Johns Hopkins, 1998

In the midst of his distinguished career as a classicist, Lowell Edmunds paused to focus his critical talents on a cultural artifact packed with just as much meaning as a Minoan terracotta or an Ionic capital. Originally published in 1981 as “The Silver Bullet: The Martini in American Civilization,” Edmunds’s book finds seven meanings in the martini (among them: “The Martini Is Optimistic, Not Pessimistic,” “The Martini Is the Drink of Adults, Not of Children”) and four ambiguities (“The Martini Is Sensitive—The Martini Is Tough”). He’s not quite the cocktail snob that I am—he is willing to consider that a martini can be made from vodka—but one suspects that Edmunds does prefer his bullets straight up and very dry.

via Five Best Books on Alcohol – WSJ.com.

… and I’m sure he doesn’t consider the horror of the ‘Appletini’ and its ilk in the Martini category either; just because it’s in a Martini glass doesn’t make it a ‘tini’ …