Hungover
The Morning After and One Man's Quest for the Cure
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4.0 • 4 Ratings
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
“Bishop-Stall insists that hangovers… [are] worthy of a cure. After years of dogged research around the globe, he finds one — just in time for the holidays.” —Washington Post
“[An] irreverent, well-oiled memoir…Bishop-Stall packs his book with humorous and enlightening asides about alcohol.” —The Wall Street Journal
One intrepid reporter's quest to learn everything there is to know about hangovers, trying all of the cures he can find and explaining how (and if) they work, all so rest of us don't have to.
We've all been there. One minute you're fast asleep, and in the next you're tumbling from dreams of deserts and demons, into semi-consciousness, mouth full of sand, head throbbing. You're hungover. Courageous journalist Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall has gone to the front lines of humanity's age-old fight against hangovers to settle once and for all the best way to get rid of the aftereffects of a night of indulgence (short of not drinking in the first place).
Hangovers have plagued human beings for about as long as civilization has existed (and arguably longer), so there has been plenty of time for cures to be concocted. But even in 2018, little is actually known about hangovers, and less still about how to cure them. Cutting through the rumor and the myth, Hungover explores everything from polar bear swims, to saline IV drips, to the age-old hair of the dog, to let us all know which ones actually work. And along the way, Bishop-Stall regales readers with stories from humanity's long and fraught relationship with booze, and shares the advice of everyone from Kingsley Amis to a man in a pub.
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.
