Hungover
The Morning After and One Man's Quest for a Cure
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
“A rip-roaring adventure story.” —Tabatha Southey
“Highly knowledgeable and ridiculously enjoyable.” —Stacey May Fowles, author of Baseball Life Advice
“Brilliantly balancing humour and horror.” —National Post
“A world tour of a party, with a raucous cast of winos and experts.” —Shelf Awareness
“Unabashedly droll.” —The New Yorker
“You turn the pages thinking, ‘Thank God I don’t feel like that right now.’ Or maybe, ‘Thank God I’m not this guy.’” —The New York Times Book Review
As long as there have been hangovers, there have been attempts to get rid of them.
The ancient Romans consumed owl eggs, the Mongolians sheep eyes and the Syrians ground-up sparrow beaks. To this day, despite convenience-store shelves full of mass-marketed elixirs, a true antidote still eludes us. In Hungover: The Morning After and One Man’s Quest for a Cure, acclaimed journalist and witty raconteur Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall risks “life and liver” (Adam Rogers) to explore what happens to our bodies and minds when we over-imbibe and all the ways that we have tried to find relief. He delves into the infamous consequences of those rough mornings experienced by the greats of the past—from Noah to Churchill to pitcher David Wells—and recounts his own daring mission to find a cure so that you don’t have to.
Hungover is an irresistible blend of culture, history, science, philosophy and mischievous humour. Part Simon Winchester, part A. J. Jacobs and all Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall, Hungover is both a lamentation and a celebration of a very human experience.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Bishop-Stall (Down to This: Squalor and Splendour in a Big-City Shantytown) explores the history and treatment of hangovers with humor and an amiable style, hindered by disorganization and gratuitous length. Believing the topic to be underexamined, he crisscrosses the globe to try "every tincture, tonic, powder, pill, placebo, root, leaf, bark, chemical and therapeutic process I could test, and then some others." The reader follows him to an IV treatment at Hangover Heaven in Las Vegas, a session with Reset (a powder-liquid mix) at the Hangover Information Center in Amsterdam, and a Kr uter-Herbaud (herbal hay bath) in Almdorf Seinerzeit, Austria. Intriguing minihistories include the derivation of the phrase "hair of the dog," the connection between drinking and sin, and theories regarding why glasses are clinked together during toasts. Bishop-Stall also inserts other material experimenting with creating his own hangover cure, recreating a pub crawl from the comedy film The World's End into an already busy book. An ingratiating writer, he can be enamored with sentences that sound good, but don't communicate much ("I became like a man scared of himself, yet undaunted by the morning"). Though perhaps well-matched to the subject, this book's shambling and loose-limbed structure mostly detracts from its focus.
