The James Logan Courier

Editors' Note: Each week, The Courier spotlights new materials arriving, or soon to arrive, in the Media Center.
Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood by Koren Zailckas
Hardcover: 368 pages
Publisher: Viking Adult (February 7, 2005)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0670033766
ISBN-13: 978-0670033768

From Penguin Books:
Garnering a vast amount of attention from young people and parents, and from book buyers across the country, Smashed became a media sensation and a New York Times bestseller. Eye-opening and utterly gripping, Koren Zailckas’s story is that of thousands of girls like her who are not alcoholics—yet—but who routinely use booze as a shortcut to courage and a stand-in for good judgment.

With one stiff sip of Southern Comfort at the age of fourteen, Zailckas is initiated into the world of drinking. From then on, she will drink faithfully, fanatically. In high school, her experimentation will lead to a stomach pumping. In college, her excess will give way to a pattern of self-poisoning that will grow more destructive each year. At age twenty-two, Zailckas will wake up in an unfamiliar apartment in New York City, elbow her friend who is passed out next to her, and ask, "Where are we?" Smashed is a sober look at how she got there and, after years of blackouts and smashups, what it took for her to realize she had to stop drinking. Smashed is an astonishing literary debut destined to become a classic.


Ambitious Brew : The Story of American Beer by Maureen Ogle
Hardcover: 432 pages
Publisher: Harcourt (October 2, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0151010129
ISBN-13: 978-0151010127

From AmbitiousBrew.com:
When a wave of German immigrants arrived in the middle of the nineteenth century, they promptly set about re-creating the pleasures of the biergartens they had left behind. Just fifty years later, the American-style lager beer they invented was the nation's most popular beverage -- and brewing was the nation's fifth-largest industry, ruled over by fabulously wealthy titans Frederick Pabst and Adolphus Busch. Anti-German sentiments aroused by World War I fed the flames of a well-established temperance movement (one activist even declared that "the worst of all our German enemies are Pabst, Schlitz, Blatz, and Miller"). Prohibition was the result.

Beer came back in 1933, but Americans' taste for Budweiser and Schlitz did not. Per capita beer consumption remained stagnant for the next few decades, and only reached its pre-Prohibition high again in the 1970s. That was too late to save the hundreds of small beermakers who went bankrupt in the 1950s and 1960s. By the mid-seventies, only forty-four brewers remained.

But even as those few giants monopolized the industry, a younger generation's passion for innovation and entrepreneurship sparked a new era in beer's American history. In the 1970s and 1980s, a handful of homebrewers built small breweries and began making lagers and ales of a sort not seen in the United States since the mid-nineteenth century. Today there are well over a thousand breweries and brewpubs in the United States and there has never been a better time to explore the pleasures of fine beer.