Drinking in America

Our Secret History

By: Susan Cheever

Narrated by: Barbara Benjamin Creel

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.

Critic reviews

"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

A Nation of Drunks-But Hey, Whats Wrong WithThat

Would you try another book from Susan Cheever and/or Barbara Benjamin Creel?

Maybe after a couple of drinks.

Would you recommend Drinking in America to your friends? Why or why not?

I would recommend it, but it is a topic that may not appeal to most readers though.

What about Barbara Benjamin Creel’s performance did you like?

Kind of neutral. Nothing stood out as either great or poor.

If this book were a movie would you go see it?

This book is not suited to be a movie. Mostly American history based around our obsession with alcohol.

Any additional comments?

A little dry for my taste. No pun intended.

Some what liberal interpretation of history.

Taking drinking in context to historical events, this author opens reader's eyes to a part of history not taught in schools...but it should be.

Informative!

It was a neat little book on a circumscribed topic. I’m glad I read it. I wish it didn’t skip around in time, though.

Informative

Good listen. The book is full of information and from a perspective that seems seldom seen.

very well written but focuses on well known people

Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?

..Secret history of celebs. My fault, I think I was looking for something about bootleggers rather than a history of the drinkers who are famous. I consider then to be a small effect of drinking in America.