Drinking: A Love Story
Author: Caroline Knapp
Fifteen million Americans a year are plagued with alcoholism. Five million of them are women. Many of them, like Caroline Knapp, started in their early teens and began to use alcohol as "liquid armor," a way to protect themselves against the difficult realities of life. In this extraordinarily candid and revealing memoir, Knapp offers important insights not only about alcoholism, but about life itself and how we learn to cope with it.
James Marcus
Caroline Knapp started drinking when she was 14, and spent almost 20 years as an alcoholic. Throughout the 1980s she maintained a good front, holding down a high-pressure job at the Boston Phoenix and keeping her addiction under wraps. Much of the time she managed to hide it even from herself: "You know and you don't know. You know and you won't know, and as long as the outsides of your life remain intact -- your job and your professional persona -- it's very hard to accept that the insides, the pieces of you that have to do with integrity and self-esteem, are slowly rotting away." This acceptance didn't come to Knapp until the early 1990s, when she finally entered a rehab program. Drinking, then, is a tale of recovery, with the emphasis on Before rather than After. When Knapp sticks to her own story, her writing is lucid and uncontaminated by self-pity. Her account of the way that alcohol "travels through families like water over a landscape" convinces us by its very specificity. Often, however, Knapp is unsure of whether she wants to write a literary memoir or a more general discussion of alcoholism. Over and over she interrupts herself to splice in statistics and vignettes she's collected from other drinkers, and while she delivers this stuff with requisite professionalism, it robs the book of its focus. Her story, she seems to suggest, approximates those of the other 15 million alcoholics in America. But approximations are exactly what we don't want in (as Knapp herself calls it) a love story. -- Salon
Publishers Weekly
In a starred review, PW called Knapp's memoir of alcoholism "extraordinarily lucid" and "filled with insights." (June)
Kirkus Reviews
Boston columnist and New Woman contributing editor Knapp writes with unflinching honesty about her 20 years as an alcoholic, her struggle to overcome the addiction, and the special peril facing women drinkers.
Knapp was a drinker able to hold down a steady job while convincing herself (and others) that her drinking was not interfering with her life—that, in fact, it was making life easier. She drank to forget her problems or to get through a crisis. She rationalized the drinking by telling herself that she would stop after she came through an especially rough situation, never realizing that the drinking contributed to her difficulties. Knapp drank during her simultaneous involvement with two men, hiding each from the other. She drank through her parents' painful deaths a year apart, raiding their liquor cabinet, hiding bottles in the bathroom. The death of her prominent analyst father—and the subsequent realization that he, too, had been an alcoholic—started her on the slow path to recovery, although it was almost two years after his death before she checked herself into a clinic. His death made her wonder "if I would have been able to let go of alcohol without letting go of my father first." Through rehab and nightly AA meetings she was finally able to take control of her life. Knapp also suffered from anorexia during her 20s, and she believes that there is a link for women between food disorders, drinking, and other addictions. She suggests that women are particularly vulnerable to the belief that the abuse of drink, drugs, and food can and will change them for the better—not realizing the terrible physical and emotional tolls of such behavior.
Knapp is prone to repetitiousness, but this is still a soul- baring memoir with cogent insights into the nightmarish world of addiction.
UltraMetabolism Cookbook: 200 Delicious Recipes that Will Turn on Your Fat-Burning DNA
Author: Mark Hyman
From the Three-Time New York Times Bestselling Author of Ultraprevention, Ultrametabolism, and The Ultrasimple Diet
In UltraMetabolism, Dr. Mark Hyman brought the new science of weight loss to the general public. By learning to work with the body instead of against it, you can ignite your natural fat-burning furnace and reprogram your body to burn fat and keep it off for good.
Simply put, eat the right foods and send instructions of weight loss and health; eat the wrong foods and send messages of weight gain and disease.
The UltraMetabolism Cookbook puts Ultra-Metabolism into overdrive with 200 convenient, easy-to-prepare, and, of course, delicious recipes for the right foods that will bring on a lifetime of good health and healthy weight.
The first part of the book reacquaints the reader with the UltraMetabolism plan and then offers a wide variety of delicious, easily prepared dishes for both Phase I -- the three-week detoxification of your system -- and Phase II, which rebalances your metabolism in four weeks and offers the way to a healthy metabolism for life!
Look your best, feel your best, perform at your best, and eat such fantastic meals as Roasted Shrimp, Turkey and Red Bean Chili, and Ratatouille. And that's just Phase I!
As you progress through the UltraMetabolism plan and enter Phase II, you'll add satisfying, flavor-packed appetizers -- Curried Deviled Eggs with Cashews, anyone? -- as well as many more new salads, meats, fish, shellfish, soups, poultry, grains, vegetables, breakfast foods, and snacks. And there are lots of plant-based options and bean dishes for vegetarians.
Inaddition to the clear, cutting-edge science and great recipes in The UltraMetabolism Cookbook, you'll find countless ideas of how to integrate the UltraMetabolism way of eating into your lifestyle, from quick weeknight suppers to entertaining and holiday meals.
