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The Alcoholic Empire: Vodka and Politics in Late Imperial Russia (review)

a sloppy and derivative adoption of insights from masculinity studies. Tebeau attempts to take the “cultural turn” by investigating the “work culture” and “work practices” of both underwriters and firefighters, finding that they changed over time as the objectives of each institution were transformed and as the larger context of work changed. This approach wields some worthwhile insights, including an assessment of underwriting as an aspect of changing middle-class identity. Tebeau dilates on the manhood and masculinity of firemen at great length with little attribution, adding nothing new to our understanding of how gender shaped firemen or firefighting. That firemen have embodied traits associated with the most pronounced versions of manliness was a novel component of Amy Greenberg’s thesis in Cause for Alarm: The Volunteer Fire Department in the Nineteenth-Century City (Princeton, 1997), which definitively makes the case that antebellum volunteer fire companies were far more intent on shoring up manhood than feeding class conflict. Moreover, Tebeau overlooks many fine studies of masculinity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including John Kasson’s expert rendering in Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man (Hill and Wang, 2001). In the end, scholars interested in firefighting will be disappointed with Eating Smoke, but others will find it useful, indeed essential, as a source of information about the history of fire insurance.