Reveals the history of our struggle with alcoholism and the emergence of a search for sobriety that is as old as our nation. In Drunks, Christopher Finan introduces us to a colorful cast of characters who were integral in America’s moral journey to understanding alcoholism. There's the remarkable Iroquois leader named Handsome Lake, a drunk who stopped drinking and dedicated his life to helping his people achieve sobriety. In the early nineteenth century, the idealistic and energetic “Washingtonians,” a group of reformed alcoholics, led the first national movement to save men like themselves. After the Civil War, doctors began to recognize that chronic drunkenness is an illness, and Dr. Leslie Keeley invented a “gold cure” that was dispensed at more than a hundred clinics around the country. But most Americans rejected a scientific explanation of alcoholism. A century after the ignominious death of Charles Adams came Carrie Nation. The wife of a drunk, she destroyed bars with a hatchet in her fury over what alcohol had done to her family. Prohibition became the law of the land, but nothing could stop the drinking. Finan also tells the dramatic story of Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith, who helped each other stay sober and then created AA, which survived its tumultuous early years and finally proved that alcoholics could stay sober for a lifetime. This is narrative history at its best: entertaining and authoritative, an important portrait of one of America’s great liberation movements and essential reading for anyone involved in the addiction community.

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.

Fresia Castillo's father left Chile smuggled in the boot of a car; her mother crossed the Andes by bus with two small children. Fresia, a photographer, has lived all of her life in Britain, but following the death of her father, she has decided it is time to return. Despite one previous visit when she felt at odds with her Chilean relatives, she is drawn to a land so rich in landscapes and extremes. It is also, of course, a place of political extremes, and the aftershocks of Pinochet's regime are still reverberating. On the journey to Santiago she meets Joe, a young university lecturer. When the two of them become entangled with a wealthy and mysterious Anglo-Chilean whose son has disappeared from a bar, their journey takes some unexpected turns. Exotic and sensuous, this is beguiling novel about identity, loyalty, friendship and unrequited love set against the backdrop of a country emerging from political turmoil.

A thirty-four-year old entertainment lawyer from Los Angeles is having a bad week. His wife throws him out in the middle of a rainstorm, his mother is diagnosed a deadly cancer and in grief he abruptly resigns his prestigious job after a big success in a major copyright case. What happens to a man used to getting what he wants when the wheels come off his carefully planned glamorous life? The author chronicles his seven year descent into darkness and near death along with a subsequent renewal.

Silkworth Hardcover

** BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week ** Shark Drunk is, in part, the tale of two men in a very small boat on the trail of a very big fish. It is also a story of obsession, enchantment and adventure. A love song to the sea, in all its mystery, hardship, wonder and life-giving majesty. In the great depths surrounding the remote Lofoten islands in Norway lives the Greenland shark. Twenty-six feet in length and weighing more than a tonne, it can live for 200 years. Its fluorescent green, parasite-covered eyes are said to hypnotise its prey, and its meat is so riddled with poison that, when consumed, it sends people into a hallucinatory trance. Armed with little more than their wits and a tiny rubber boat, Morten Strøksnes and his friend Hugo set out in pursuit of this enigmatic creature. Together, they tackle existential questions, experience the best and worst nature can throw at them, and explore the astonishing life teeming at the ocean’s depths.

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.