A comprehensive look at the human relationship with alcohol, at a time when many are beginning to question it.
Thinking about drinking.
Problem drinkers who seek to get sober are told they will always remember their first drink and how it felt. The mind-altering experience is indelible and life-changing. For Knowles, a British surgeon and professor, that moment came on a school trip in Germany at age 13 with a liter of lager. Nearly 30 years later, his love affair with our favorite drug ended with a half-empty bottle of Bacardi, a gun, and thoughts of suicide. In seeking to understand his own troubled relationship with alcohol, Knowles has produced a work that turns the magnifying glass on human society and history and how we developed a global relationship with a drug that has caused us great harm to our health and our relationships. These are questions many are asking in this moment, after alcohol consumption rates, which soared during the Covid-19 pandemic, are crashing. The number of Americans who drink has fallen to a 90-year low, according to a 2025 Gallup survey. Though not every person who drinks is addicted to alcohol or exhibits problematic behavior, many of us are reexamining our relationship with a drug that is legal, socially condoned, and often more dangerous than we like to acknowledge. The paradox, of course, is that drinking feels good to so many. We speak less openly of its wreckage. This investigation, the author is careful to note, is not a lecture: “I have no wish to ban alcohol or stop anyone who enjoys it from continuing to do so.” Nor is it a manual on how to get sober in 30 days. Rather, the book digs deep into the relationship with our favorite mind-altering chemical and offers a robust, thorough examination of how alcohol seeped into our lives and the many ways it endangers them.
A comprehensive look at the human relationship with alcohol, at a time when many are beginning to question it.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2026
ISBN: 9781250392923
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.
The chef, rapper, and TV host serves up a blustery memoir with lashings of self-help.
“I’ve always had a sick confidence,” writes Bronson, ne Ariyan Arslani. The confidence, he adds, comes from numerous sources: being a New Yorker, and more specifically a New Yorker from Queens; being “short and fucking husky” and still game for a standoff on the basketball court; having strength, stamina, and seemingly no fear. All these things serve him well in the rough-and-tumble youth he describes, all stickball and steroids. Yet another confidence-builder: In the big city, you’ve got to sink or swim. “No one is just accepted—you have to fucking show that you’re able to roll,” he writes. In a narrative steeped in language that would make Lenny Bruce blush, Bronson recounts his sentimental education, schooled by immigrant Italian and Albanian family members and the mean streets, building habits good and bad. The virtue of those habits will depend on your take on modern mores. Bronson writes, for example, of “getting my dick pierced” down in the West Village, then grabbing a pizza and smoking weed. “I always smoke weed freely, always have and always will,” he writes. “I’ll just light a blunt anywhere.” Though he’s gone through the classic experiences of the latter-day stoner, flunking out and getting arrested numerous times, Bronson is a hard charger who’s not afraid to face nearly any challenge—especially, given his physique and genes, the necessity of losing weight: “If you’re husky, you’re always dieting in your mind,” he writes. Though vulgar and boastful, Bronson serves up a model that has plenty of good points, including his growing interest in nature, creativity, and the desire to “leave a legacy for everybody.”
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4478-5
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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