Drink: The Intimate Relationship Between Women and Alcohol

by Ann Dowsett Johnston Narrated by Carrington MacDuffie

Overview

In Drink: The Intimate Relationship Between Women and Alcohol, award-winning journalist Anne Dowsett Johnston combines in-depth research with her own personal story of recovery, and delivers a groundbreaking examination of a shocking yet little recognized epidemic threatening society today: the precipitous rise in risky drinking among women and girls.

With the feminist revolution, women have closed the gender gap in their professional and educational lives. They have also achieved equality with men in more troubling areas as well. In the U.S. alone, the rates of alcohol abuse among women have skyrocketed in the past decade. DUIs, “drunkorexia” (choosing to limit eating to consume greater quantities of alcohol), and health problems connected to drinking are all rising-a problem exacerbated by the alcohol industry itself.

Battling for women's dollars and leisure time, corporations have developed marketing strategies and products targeted exclusively to women. Equally alarming is a recent CDC report showing a sharp rise in binge drinking, putting women and girls at further risk.

As she brilliantly weaves in-depth research,*interviews with leading researchers, and the moving story of her own struggle with alcohol abuse, Johnston illuminates this startling epidemic, dissecting the psychological, social, and industry factors that have contributed to its rise, and exploring its long-lasting impact on our society and individual lives.

Editorial Reviews

Washington Post

wallop of a book… full of riveting candor…Johnston brings the weight of her journalism and academic experience to build a convincing case that women are increasingly succumbing to the dark side of alcohol

Susan Cheever

A powerful and important book about the increase in alcoholism and binge-drinking among women, and about our willful blindness to the damages of drinking in our culture.

Margaret Trudeau

A game-changing look at one of our culture’s hidden problems . . . honest, brave and inspirational.

Susan Juby

In this comprehensively researched and insightful book, Ann Dowsett Johnston chronicles her own destructive dance with alcohol, her recovery and explores disturbing trends in contemporary women’s relationship to alcohol. A crucially important book for anyone interested in women’s health and addiction issues.

Library Journal

Along with huge strides in education, employment, and basic rights, women worldwide are experiencing strides of another, less fortunate sort: risky drink that has increased to epidemic proportions. Five-time National Magazine Award winner Dowsett Johnston offers the facts while also disclosing her own struggle with alcohol. With a 40,000-copy first printing.

Kirkus Reviews

2013-09-15
Award-winning Canadian journalist Johnston expands on her 14-part Toronto Star series on women and alcohol. "Has alcohol become the modern woman's steroid, enabling her to do the heavy lifting necessary in an endlessly complex world?" asks the author. Coming of age in the 1970s, Johnston was part of the first wave of women inspired by Gloria Steinem. As both a devoted mother and an editor at Maclean's, she played her part in closing the gender gap. Like other women of her generation--and to a greater degree, the young women who followed her--she also fell into the trap of using alcohol as a crutch to ease the stress of balancing career and motherhood. She uses her own experience of increasing dependency on drinking to illustrate a broader, worsening trend among young Canadian and American women of out-of-control, binge drinking. "One in five high-school girls binge drinks," writes Johnson. Among women of childbearing age, the number is higher. If they drink while pregnant, they put their babies at risk for fetal alcohol syndrome. Johnston explains how young women are not only vulnerable to sexual abuse when they drink to excess, but they also endanger themselves physiologically (for metabolic and hormonal reasons) when they try to match men drink for drink. In the author's opinion, a misplaced idea of female entitlement is partially responsible, but the alcohol industry also plays a significant role through the marketing of new brands of trendy wines for women with names such as "French Rabbit" and "MommyJuice." There are also "Skinnygirl Cocktails" packaged for the calorie-conscious drinker. Today, Johnston is a member of Alcoholics Anonymous and an advocate on public policy. A compelling sociological study and memoir.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940173487384
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	10/01/2013
Edition description:	Unabridged

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