Post #812025 by arriano on Tue, Feb 6, 2024 3:56 PM

So I've read the whole book now, and it's an odd read. First, it's surprisingly short and is more of a collection of anecdotes than a biography. Plus, a good chunk of the book is about the author (Sunny's daughter) than about Sunny, even though the title of the book would lead you to think otherwise.

But there's really not much meat here to the stories. There's not a lot of info on why Sunny was so successful with the three Don the Beachcombers she was running. There's a lot of name dropping of famous people, especially actors. Very little information is sourced so you're left wondering if a story is true or legend. Several images in the book are too small and blurry to read, including several pages of a letter and a few news articles. A lot of details are repeated -- I think it's stated that Sunny was "a beautiful Nordic blonde" about 50 times. Ok, we get it!

Most chapters end with a cocktail recipe, and several are different from Beachbum Berry's DtB recipes. But there's no source of the recipes given, so I don't know if they were among her mother's papers, the author got them from a former DtB bartender or if she just created her own versions. Perhaps the oddest recipe is for the Zombie, where it's claimed that Don's Mix is actually passion fruit juice!

In short, this book really needed to be co-written by a good editor and researcher. I guess it's worth reading for what info there is, but I've got doubts about a lot of the stories simply because much of it seems to be hearsay.