"A compelling read, sad and wistful and breathtakingly forthright."—Chicago Magazine Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg loved his job, his wife, and his two young sons. But he also loved to drink. Drunkard is an unflinchingly honest account of one man's descent into alcoholism and his ambivalent struggle to embrace sobriety. Sentenced to an outpatient rehab program, Steinberg discovers that twenty-eight days of therapy cannot reverse the toll taken by decades of hard drinking. As Steinberg claws his way through recovery, grieves the loss of the drink, and tries to shore up his faltering marriage, he is confronted by the greatest test he has ever faced, and finds himself in the process. Steinberg's gripping memoir is a frank and often painfully funny account of the stark-yet-common realities of a disease that affects millions.

The Drunkard's Path is self-help and career guide based on four decades of working in the hospitality industry. It offers practical working advice to anyone on a career path, be it the readers first steps or someone well into their journey. With his matter-of-fact style, sometimes funny, sometimes serious, Barry lets the reader know they have the power to shape themselves and their career into something that will create a more valuable self in the future. Barry does this through examining different aspects of work in the hospitality and service business and the knowledge required to accomplish the work, along with interspersed stories and humorous anecdotes, all while making the topic relevant to the reader. Through examples and practical tools, Barry takes the reader through the process of how to think like an entrepreneur, and how and why to construct one's own narrative. This book is about you and your story. It mobilized you to challenge yourself to become the main character in your story-a story about a successful and meaningful career and a fulfilling future. Do you want to be the lead character in your own story? Learn how to create your story and build your career from the foundation up. You have the ability to make this life about yourself. It starts with your current job and learning to be a more effective employee, the employee that everyone wants to work with. Becoming that employee builds the strong foundation for your career and for your life. In this book you will learn how to begin your journey, starting with the fundamentals of what it takes to build a meaningful career, in whatever field you choose. No matter where you work, you can excel in any job. Learn ideas, practices, and philosophies that will challenge you to create your own path. One that allows you to take control of your story. Through examples and practical tools, Barry takes you through the process of how to think like an entrepreneur, and how and why to construct your own narrative. This book is about you and your story. Challenge yourself to become the main character in your story-a story about a successful and meaningful career and a fulfilling future. Why the Drunkard's Path? The Drunkard's Path is a name given to zig-zag quilt patterns that are difficult to learn, but once achieved, they open a more extensive range of possible designs. You will find that your own life will be much like The Drunkard's Path. As you wind through the years, you will be constantly exposed to new learning opportunities. If you take on the challenging ones, you will find a wider space of possibilities will be open to you.

This open access book surveys drinking in Britain between the Licensing Act of 1869 and the wartime regulations imposed on alcohol production and consumption after 1914. This was a period marked by the expansion of the drink industry and by increasingly restrictive licensing laws. Politics and commerce co-existed with moral and medical concerns about drunkenness and combined, these factors pushed alcohol consumers into the public spotlight. Through an analysis of public and private records, medical texts and sociological studies, the book investigates the reasons why Victorians and Edwardians consumed alcohol in the ways that they did and explores the ideas about alcohol that circulated in the period. This book shows that they had many reasons for purchasing and consuming alcoholic substances and these were driven by broader social, cultural, medical and commercial factors. Although drunkenness may have been the most visible consequence of alcohol consumption, it was not the only type of drinking behaviour. Alcohol played an important social role in the everyday lives of Victorians and Edwardians where its consumption held many different meanings.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the classroom to the courtroom and from financial markets to supermarkets, an intriguing and illuminating look at how randomness, chance, and probability affect our daily lives that will intrigue, awe, and inspire. “Mlodinow writes in a breezy style, interspersing probabilistic mind-benders with portraits of theorists.... The result is a readable crash course in randomness.” —The New York Times Book Review With the born storyteller's command of narrative and imaginative approach, Leonard Mlodinow vividly demonstrates how our lives are profoundly informed by chance and randomness and how everything from wine ratings and corporate success to school grades and political polls are less reliable than we believe. By showing us the true nature of chance and revealing the psychological illusions that cause us to misjudge the world around us, Mlodinow gives us the tools we need to make more informed decisions. From the classroom to the courtroom and from financial markets to supermarkets, Mlodinow's intriguing and illuminating look at how randomness, chance, and probability affect our daily lives will intrigue, awe, and inspire.

An "entertaining and enlightening" deep dive into the alcohol-soaked origins of civilization—and the evolutionary roots of humanity's appetite for intoxication (Daniel E. Lieberman, author of Exercised). While plenty of entertaining books have been written about the history of alcohol and other intoxicants, none have offered a comprehensive, convincing answer to the basic question of why humans want to get high in the first place. Drunk elegantly cuts through the tangle of urban legends and anecdotal impressions that surround our notions of intoxication to provide the first rigorous, scientifically-grounded explanation for our love of alcohol. Drawing on evidence from archaeology, history, cognitive neuroscience, psychopharmacology, social psychology, literature, and genetics, Drunk shows that our taste for chemical intoxicants is not an evolutionary mistake, as we are so often told. In fact, intoxication helps solve a number of distinctively human challenges: enhancing creativity, alleviating stress, building trust, and pulling off the miracle of getting fiercely tribal primates to cooperate with strangers. Our desire to get drunk, along with the individual and social benefits provided by drunkenness, played a crucial role in sparking the rise of the first large-scale societies. We would not have civilization without intoxication. From marauding Vikings and bacchanalian orgies to sex-starved fruit flies, blind cave fish, and problem-solving crows, Drunk is packed with fascinating case studies and engaging science, as well as practical takeaways for individuals and communities. The result is a captivating and long overdue investigation into humanity's oldest indulgence—one that explains not only why we want to get drunk, but also how it might actually be good for us to tie one on now and then.

Featured in The Globe and Mail's Winter books preview: 36 reads to get you through till spring On 49th Shelf's Most Anticipated: Spring 2020 Fiction Preview List On CBC Books' list of 47 works of Canadian fiction to watch for in spring 2020 The Coen Brothers meets Kurt Vonnegut. Francis Blackstone is a fourteen-year-old gunslinger with a heart of gold. He's fallen for the mayor's daughter and resolves to make his mark, and his fortune, to win her favour. And what better way than to rob a Manhattan Company bank? Enter Bob Temple, the volatile outlaw who takes Francis under his wing-- though not without a degree of suspicion-- and so begins the adventures of the Blackstone Temple Gang as they crisscross the west in search of treasure, redemption, and the possibility of requited love. After an encounter with a rival gang, Francis and Bob Temple are chased over the Sierras to California, where they enjoy unexpected fame as gentleman bandits. But their newfound celebrity brings hardships as well, and when their final job takes a startling turn, Francis is forced to discover what it means to make peace with a world that stands against him. At once a tribute to boyhood enthusiasm and the heroes of classical quests, Like Rum-Drunk Angels is an offbeat, slightly magical, entirely original retelling of Aladdin as an American western.

2020 Gourmand Award in Spirits Gold Medal winner in the Independent Book Publishers Awards China is one of the world's leading producers and consumers of liquor, with alcohol infusing all aspects of its culture, from religion and literature to business and warfare. Yet to the outside world, China's most famous spirit, baijiu, remains a mystery. This is about to change, as baijiu is now being served in cocktail bars beyond its borders. Drunk in China follows Derek Sandhaus's journey of discovery into the world's oldest drinking culture. He travels throughout the country and around the globe to meet with distillers, brewers, snake-oil salesmen, archaeologists, and ordinary drinkers. He examines the many ways in which alcohol has shaped Chinese society and its rituals. He visits production floors, karaoke parlors, hotpot joints, and speakeasies. Along the way he uncovers a tradition spanning more than nine thousand years and explores how recent economic and political developments have conspired to push Chinese alcohol beyond the nation's borders for the first time. As Chinese society becomes increasingly international, its drinking culture must also adapt to the times. Can the West also adapt and clink glasses with China? Read Drunk in China and find out.