Reseña de Drinking in America por Josh

Drinking in America is a survey of the ways in which alcohol and drunkenness have impacted national history.

Cheever, a former alcoholic and daughter of the novelist John Cheever, intertwines her own family's history of alcoholism with the national story.

Cheever is pretty critical of the impact of alcohol - but she's also willing to acknowledge its uses and virtues. For example in her discussion of the impact of alcohol on the Civil War general Ulysses S. Grant she argues that alcohol may have made Grant overconfident and irrationally optimistic about his chances for success in the face of poor odds. But, at least in the view of Abraham Lincoln and many others, those were exactly the traits they wanted in a military leader. Grant's sober predecessor, George MccLellan had been an ineffectual general because he (quite reasonably) was afraid of battle.

The chapters in the book are chronological and are otherwise connected only by the fact that they re-examine familiar stories with an emphasis on the influence of alcohol. For example, Chapter 13 reviews the history of drinking in the secret service. Cheever notes that 9 of the 15 secret service agents attending JFK on the day of his assassination had been out drinking the night before and had gotten only a few hours of sleep. They were groggy and slow to act after the first shot. Drinking the night before they would be on duty was technically against secret service rules and there was some criticism of the agents when it came out, but it was also perfectly socially acceptable behavior and there's no way to know whether they could have saved the president even with faster reflexes so they didn't face any official censure.

For much of the twentieth century being an alcoholic was practically a job requirement for novelists. Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Cheever (John), Bukowski, Vonnegut, and others too numerous to list were alcoholics. Vonnegut noted this trend and suggested that because fiction writing was seen as an effeminate occupation any male writer needed to get into regular drunken brawls to prove that he wasn't a homosexual.

Much of the book focuses on drunken politicians. Richard Nixon is a curious case of a drunk who didn't actually drink very much, but apparently could be almost incapacitated by a single a drink and had the unfortunate habit of going on binges when critical decisions needed to be made. Henry Kissinger and other senior advisors recounted a number of instances in which Nixon called in the middle of the night, clearly drunk, demanding that the U.S. bomb countries we were not at war with. In one case he was so insistent that the U.S. fleet was readied to attack, and the commander on duty falsely claimed that the weather was preventing them form launching bombers so they would have to wait until the next day - by which time Nixon had forgotten that he had given the order.

Overall I found it interesting, but some chapters were more interesting than others. Each essentially stands alone and they don't really cohere as a unified narrative, though that's probably inherent to the scope of topic.