Drinking in America, Susan Cheever
Drinking in America, Susan Cheever
3 Rating(s)
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Drinking in America
Our Secret History

Author: Susan Cheever

Narrator: Barbara Benjamin Creel

Unabridged: 9 hr 1 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Twelve

Published: 10/13/2015

Synopsis

In Drinking in America, bestselling author Susan Cheever chronicles our national love affair with liquor, taking a long, thoughtful look at the way alcohol has changed our nation's history. This is the often-overlooked story of how alcohol has shaped American events and the American character from the seventeenth to the twentieth century.

Seen through the lens of alcoholism, American history takes on a vibrancy and a tragedy missing from many earlier accounts. From the drunkenness of the Pilgrims to Prohibition hijinks, drinking has always been a cherished American custom: a way to celebrate and a way to grieve and a way to take the edge off. At many pivotal points in our history-the illegal Mayflower landing at Cape Cod, the enslavement of African Americans, the McCarthy witch hunts, and the Kennedy assassination, to name only a few-alcohol has acted as a catalyst.

Some nations drink more than we do, some drink less, but no other nation has been the drunkest in the world as America was in the 1830s only to outlaw drinking entirely a hundred years later. Both a lively history and an unflinching cultural investigation, Drinking in America unveils the volatile ambivalence within one nation's tumultuous affair with alcohol.

About Susan Cheever

Susan Cheever is the author of both nonfiction and fiction works, including My Name is Bill, Note Found in a Bottle, As Good As I Could Be, Home Before Dark, and Treetops. She is the director of the Yaddo Corporation, and has received the Associated Press Award, the Boston Globe's Winship Medal, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in New York City.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Andrew on November 26, 2015

There are a lot of interesting theories here, but they're mostly conjecture and extrapolated from very little real evidence. It's also sloppily written, frequently repeating the same phrases or bits of information, breaking chronology in confusing ways, and burying important information in service o......more

Goodreads review by Richard on November 29, 2015

This is a good book, entertaining and well written. But I’m sure Susan Cheever would agree that, as a historian, her first duty is to the facts. A factual error, even if minor and not related to the central premise, creates a red flag, and is apt to make the reader view the rest of the work with sus......more

Goodreads review by Bandit on September 20, 2015

I love thematic histories. There is just something really awesome about having a cohesive thread connecting the individual stories/eras, etc. This is my second thematic history of US and the first good one, the other one connected through guns, which is arguably just as American. Or not. At least no......more

Goodreads review by Nick on July 16, 2017

Interesting and concise history of America's boozy past, filled with fascinating stories and anecdotes that propel this brisk book along from the Mayflower landing to today. Who knew the U.S. was at its most drunken during the colonial era and the Revolution? Susan Cheever explores the fascinating m......more

Goodreads review by Coral on October 10, 2018

If this book were a person, I’d say they were a drunk. It’s repetitive, sloppily written in places, poorly organized, and has more than a few factual errors. It starts off fun but becomes more and more annoying as it goes on. I’ll give credit to Cheevers for stating her bias openly in the beginning:......more

Quotes

"A fascinating look at the place and function of alcohol throughout American history...[Cheever] offers a colorful portrait of a society that, like her own family, has been indelibly shaped by its drinking habits. An intelligently argued study of our country's 'passionate connection to drinking.'"—Kirkus Reviews

"Susan Cheever offers a humane but unsentimental view of our nation's inebriated past in DRINKING IN AMERICA. To excuse the pun, it's an addictive read full of wit and verve, revealing the deep influence of alcohol on many of our country's most significant moments, from the landing at Plymouth Harbour, to the Kennedy Assassination and Watergate. This is terrific social history but not as it's usually told, and all the better for it."—Amanda Foreman, author of Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire (winner of the Whitbread) and A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War

"Cheever's central observation is fascinating...The melting pot, it seems, was also a mixing bowl."—Publishers Weekly

"Insightful...well-researched and well-developed...An engrossing, in-depth examination of the profound ways alcohol and drinking have shaped and contributed to American history."—Shelf Awareness

"Cheever is full of such shocking and often delightful revelations of a history we never learned in school."—Newsday

"I can't stop raving (soberly!) about Susan Cheever's new book... It is both enlightening and frightening. A brilliant and important addition to our understanding of what goes wrong and what can continue to go wrong in a world dominated by the most deadly legal liquid ever invented."—Judy Collins

"Compelling...[a] brisk drinker's companion to US history, which runs a black light over the archives to ask: who was loaded, and why did it matter?... It's the fourth of Wilson's famous 12 steps that made it common practice for sober folk to dig into their own pasts in order to articulate the role of alcohol - to create a 'searching and fearless moral inventory' - and with DRINKING IN AMERICA, Cheever submits the US to a similar investigation. Along the way, we see a country struggling to negotiate its freedoms, nurtured by alcohol and undone by it as well....This approach can be illuminating, turning those sepia-toned historical figures in wigs into uncertain young men with tankards of rum in their hands."—Los Angeles Review of Books

"Cheever serves up a sober cocktail of American history...offers up sideways views that are intriguing."—Associated Press

"Full of compelling ideas...Cheever is smart, perceptive and disciplined...Her Nixon chapter in particular is alternately horrifying and delightful, and paints a compelling picture of the monstrous complexity of a 'great man.'"—Buffalo News

"Vivid...some of the book's most affecting moments arrive when Cheever discusses her family's drinking problems. "—The San Francisco Chronicle

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