A bombastic but vigorous and often persuasive case against drinking.
Alcohol poses a greater threat to America’s well-being than al-Qaida, argues this temperance manifesto.
Graybill (Bravo! The Case for Italian Musical Mastery, 2014, etc.), a retired history teacher, presents a wide-ranging and vehement indictment of alcoholic beverages and their destruction of the body, mind, and social fabric. He reviews statistics on alcohol’s death toll—88,000 per year in the United States—carcinogenic properties, and dire effects on the liver, brain, and developing fetuses. He revisits infamous alcoholic incidents, from the Bible story of Lot’s drunken seduction by his daughters to Edward Kennedy’s car crash at Chappaquiddick; toasts hatchet-wielding temperance crusader Carrie Nation; and mourns talents blighted by drink, from Hemingway to Lindsay Lohan. He surveys and deplores the cultural promotion and glamorization of alcohol, from winery tours to comped casino drinks, frat house hazings, and lovable comic-strip drunks like Andy Capp. At the book’s heart is a lurid litany of news reports about drunks and their disastrous antics: the pilot pulled out of the cockpit just before takeoff and the passenger who tried to open the cabin door in midflight; the woman who snuck into a zoo to pet a tiger; many men who tried to kill their girlfriends; and numerous drivers who left trails of mangled victims in their wakes. (The author includes a moving personal recollection of a family he knew that was profoundly damaged by the father’s alcoholic violence.) Graybill writes with an old-school moral outrage, decrying “the terrorist, alcohol” and thundering that “the tyrant, alcohol, had crushed our second great American Revolution” when Prohibition was repealed. He embellishes the text with anti-alcohol memes (“Sober Slogan #2: The horsefly is brainier than the barfly”), poems, and satirical songs (“Please, deceive me. Make me think / That I’m charming when I drink”). He proposes a battery of anti-drinking initiatives, some of them feasible, such as banning liquor industry ads and sponsorships, others impossibly utopian. (“There should never be a single drunkard employed within the vast and influential offices of the American media.”) The author’s partisanship and dudgeon will put off some readers, but he ably marshals his facts to craft a hard-hitting jeremiad.
A bombastic but vigorous and often persuasive case against drinking.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62006-087-2
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Brown Posey Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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