HOLMES'S COMPLETE GUIDE TO STOP DRINKING ALCOHOL

Name: HOLMES'S COMPLETE GUIDE TO STOP DRINKING ALCOHOL
Author: Mark Holmes
ISBN: 978-1-73995-891-6

THE EASY, MINDFUL AND PAIN-FREE WAY

by Mark Holmes ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 20, 2021

A comprehensive, passionate, and helpful resource for those looking for an alternative to alcohol.

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A self-help guide advocates overcoming alcohol addiction through mindfulness, inspired by cognitive behavioral therapy.

In this robust manual, Holmes, an online counselor and founder of the Addiction Help Agency, offers an easy and painless way to quit drinking alcohol permanently. The core of this process is a style of cognitive behavioral therapy with a focus on the incremental reduction of drinking and an increase in mindfulness—through meditation, self-assessment, and self-monitoring—to identify harmful patterns. To aid in this, the book provides numerous tools, from graphs and tables for recording habits to diagnostic tests like the Michigan Alcoholism Screening Test, the DSM-5, and others. The guide also discusses self-report surveys like the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale and the Dysfunctional Attitudes Scale. Alongside readers in this undertaking is Moz, a high-functioning drinker and a stand-in for the author, who struggled with alcohol. Moz presents examples of the book’s process and how it succeeded for Holmes. Moz’s experiences also act as a gateway to the deeper research the manual supplies on subjects like the role alcohol plays in popular culture, its chemical composition, and its effects on sex and oft-encountered challenges like loneliness and midlife crises. The book promises “a radical alternative to the public perception…of drinking” as well as “a revolution in alcohol awareness.” In the latter case especially, the guide succeeds. The number of resources and the extensive, well-cited research may feel overwhelming, but the author’s presentation and simple breakdowns will answer most of the questions that patient readers have. The work’s use of Sherlock Holmes quotes throughout that treat alcohol addiction as a kind of mystery to be solved is clever, and the technique never distracts or overstays its welcome. The book is primarily a self-help resource, so those without at least some awareness of their problem or possible difficulty are likely not its audience. The text’s enthusiasm for its own methods can feel like a sales pitch at times but is nonetheless encouraging and infectious.

A comprehensive, passionate, and helpful resource for those looking for an alternative to alcohol.

Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-73995-891-6

Page Count: 375

Publisher: Addiction Help Agency Ltd.

Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2021

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

HEALTH & FITNESS | SELF-HELP

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GETTING OVER GETTING OLDER

AN INTIMATE JOURNEY

by Letty Cottin Pogrebin ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 1996

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Yet another feminist offers an up-close and personal examination of trekking into middle age. Pogrebin's (Deborah, Golda, and Me, 1991, etc.) friends groaned when they heard she was writing about aging; how depressing, they thought. Readers may groan as well at the prospect of another paean to growing older. But Pogrebin, now 56, brings some fresh insights to the process, particularly in a discussion of what time means once you're over the hill. Pogrebin places herself in that small cohort born between 1932, when FDR was elected president, and 1945, the end of WW II. She labels this group ``the Roosevelt babies,'' calling them (and herself) ``unself-conscious trailblazers,'' mapping the territory of longevity for the Boomers. ``Time is all there is,'' she says, so don't hoard it or waste it trying to recapture youth. ``Use it or lose it'' is but one piece of T-shirt advice that she passes along, in company with poetry and observations from May Sarton, Simone de Beauvoir, and feminist peers from her early years at Ms. magazine. Often setting herself apart from what she views as the unrelentingly positive feminist party line on aging, she hails the value of nostalgia in a section on memory and praises diet, exercise, and hormone replacement therapy in chapters on the aging body. She also speculates on whether the public discouse on menopause will stigmatize older women as the mysteries of menstruation and PMS once kept young women in their place. In the end, Pogrebin is reconciled to the idea of dying, if not to the fact of death. While there is undeniably much that is thoughtful and useful in this volume, it's often buried in anecdotes about family and friends less interesting to general readers than to the author.