Drinking in America
Our Secret History
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this whimsical history, author Cheever (My Name Is Bill) examines four centuries of America's dysfunctional relationship with booze. Her story opens with the Pilgrims landing at Cape Cod "because they were running out of beer" and ends with the ascension of Alcoholics Anonymous. Cheever focuses on the role that giggle juice played in central events of U.S. history, including the Revolutionary War, westward expansion, the Civil War, Prohibition, and the Red Scare. She also highlights important figures in the history of drinking, including John Adams (and his family), Ethan Allen, Ulysses Grant, and her own father, John Cheever. Cheever's central observation is fascinating: "few historians even mention drinking and its effect... on events," an oversight she strives to correct. Yet some of her suppositions feel weak: that the Revolutionary War might not have happened if the colonists hadn't been such partyers; that the Civil War might have been lost if Grant's drinking hadn't been tolerated; that Kennedy might not have been assassinated if his Secret Service team hadn't been so hungover. Cheever is at her most fascinating when she sticks to facts: for example, in 1820 the average consumption of alcohol was three times what it is today, and children were sent off to elementary school fortified by "flip," a mixture of fruit juice and grain alcohol. The melting pot, it seems, was also a mixing bowl.
