Staff Pick
Drinking in America takes the history we all learned in school and adds alcohol to the picture. Apparently people were a lot drunker than we’ve been told. This book is fascinating, well written, and full of shareable anecdotes. Recommended By Britt A., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
The Pilgrims landed the Mayflower at Plymouth because they were running out of beer, and since that cold day in November of 1620 alcohol has played a pivotal part in American history. For most of its history, America has been the most bibulous country in the world, and the secret truth then and now is that a bottle of rum, a keg of hard cider or even a dry martini was often the silent third party to many decisions that have shaped our history.
In Drinking in America, best-selling author and historian Susan Cheever chronicles the many stages to our national love affair with booze, taking a long, thoughtful look at the way alcohol has permeated and affected our nation's history from the drunkenness of George Washington to the current effect of alcohol abuse American health care.
Drinking is a cherished American custom -- a way to celebrate and a way to grieve and a way to take the edge off. But where is the line between a good time and a whirlwind of destruction, between a few glasses of wine and the kind of alcoholism that leads to violence of the body and of the soul. Both a lively history and unflinching cultural investigation,
Drinking in America unveils our torrid affair with alcohol, asking: When are we going to wake up and smell the Whiskey?
Description
In
Drinking in America, bestselling author Susan Cheever chronicles our national love affair with liquor, taking a long, thoughtful look at the way alcohol has changed our nation's history. This is the often-overlooked story of how alcohol has shaped American events and the American character from the seventeenth to the twentieth century.
Seen through the lens of alcoholism, American history takes on a vibrancy and a tragedy missing from many earlier accounts. From the drunkenness of the Pilgrims to Prohibition hijinks, drinking has always been a cherished American custom: a way to celebrate and a way to grieve and a way to take the edge off. At many pivotal points in our history-the illegal Mayflower landing at Cape Cod, the enslavement of African Americans, the McCarthy witch hunts, and the Kennedy assassination, to name only a few-alcohol has acted as a catalyst.
Some nations drink more than we do, some drink less, but no other nation has been the drunkest in the world as America was in the 1830s only to outlaw drinking entirely a hundred years later. Both a lively history and an unflinching cultural investigation, DRINKING IN AMERICA unveils the volatile ambivalence within one nation's tumultuous affair with alcohol.
About the Author
Susan Cheever is the author of the biographies E.E. Cummings, American Bloomsbury, and My Name Is Bill, as well as five novels and four memoirs. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker,New York Times, and Newsday, among other magazines and anthologies. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow, has been nominated for a National Book Circle Award, and won the Boston Globe Winship medal. She attended Brown University and has taught at many places, including Yale, Brown, Columbia, the New School, and Bennington College.