Books:  Entertaining and Educational

Alcohol Awareness Reading List: Recommended by readers, for readers

Memoir/Biography:  General | Native Peoples
Non-fiction:  Historical | Miscellaneous | Literary Analysis
Fiction:  Detective/Mystery Novels| General Fiction
Native Peoples| Young Adult

Originally sponsored by our Prevention Program, this reading list includes titles from 2007 and earlier. It invites you to expand your awareness of alcohol and the role it plays in the human story. Whether your tastes run to memoir, nonfiction or a good, hard-boiled detective novel, there's something for everyone here, because everyone can be touched by alcohol misuse.

Have suggestions about additions to this list? Email Jenna, our webmaster.

By the way, the opinions expressed in the books on this list do not reflect the policies, mission or goals of Alcohol and Drug Services of Gallatin County.

MEMOIR/BIOGRAPHY

The titles in this section only are linked to Amazon.com.
Your purchase supports our reading library for staff and clients.

(From Booklist) �Maybe sinking a few drinks per diem isn't the world's best idea,
but when a wizened newspaper reporter like Hamill (now editor of the New York
Post) owns up to it and the troubles it begets, it makes great, gritty copy . . .�

All over but the Shoutin' Rick Bragg.

(Product Description Excerpt) This haunting, harrowing, gloriously moving recollection of a life on the American margin is the story of Rick Bragg, who grew up dirt-poor in northeastern Alabama, seemingly destined for either the cotton mills or the penitentiary, and instead became a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times. It is the story of Bragg's father, a hard-drinking man with a murderous temper and the habit of running out on the people who needed him most.

Drinking: A Love Story Caroline Knap.

(Product Description Excerpt) . . . journalist Caroline Knapp's powerful, New York Times-bestselling account of her twenty years as a functioning alcoholic . . . until a series of personal crises forced her to confront and, ultimately, break free of the "liquid armor" she'd used for most of her life.

John Barleycorn: "Alcoholic Memoirs" (Oxford World's Classics) Jack London.

(Product Description Excerpt) London is better known as the successful and popular author of adventure stories such as White Fang, and The Call of The Wild than as an alcoholic pessimist who finally took a fatal overdose of morphine in 1916 . . .

My Name Is Bill: Bill Wilson--His Life and the Creation of Alcoholics Anonymous
Susan Cheever.

(Product Description Excerpt) Drawn from personal letters and diaries, records in a variety of archives, and hundreds of interviews, this definitive biography is the first fully documented account of Bill Wilson's life story.

Note Found in a Bottle. Susan Cheever.

(Product Description Excerpt) Born into a world ruled and defined by the cocktail hour, in which the solution to any problem could be found in a dry martini or another glass of wine, Susan Cheever led a life both charmed and damned. She and her father, the celebrated writer John Cheever, were deeply affected and troubled by alcohol. . . At once devastating and inspiring, NOTE FOUND IN A BOTTLE offers a startlingly intimate portrait of the alcoholic's life -- and of the courageous journey to recovery.

Shouting at the Sky: Troubled teens and the promise of the wild Gary Ferguson. 

Product Description Excerpt) From earliest experimentation to habitual excess to full-blown abuse, twenty-four-year-old Koren Zailckas . . . persuades us that her story is the story of thousands of girls like her who are not alcoholics � yet � but who use booze as a short cut to courage, a stand-in for good judgment, and a bludgeon for shyness, each of them failing to see how their emotional distress, unarticulated hostility, and depression are entangled with their socially condoned binging.

Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood Koren Zailckas.

(Product Description Excerpt) From earliest experimentation to habitual excess to full-blown abuse, twenty-four-year-old Koren Zailckas . . . persuades us that her story is the story of thousands of girls like her who are not alcoholics � yet � but who use booze as a short cut to courage, a stand-in for good judgment, and a bludgeon for shyness, each of them failing to see how their emotional distress, unarticulated hostility, and depression are entangled with their socially condoned binging.

(Product Description Excerpt) Storyteller, rebel, medicine man, Lame Deer was born almost a century ago on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. . . The story he tells is one of harsh youth and reckless manhood, shotgun marriage and divorce, history and folklore as rich today as ever -- and of his fierce struggle to keep pride alive, though living as a stranger in his own ancestral land.

(Author Description) Poetry, short stories, and essays on healing and recovery from addictions and abuses. A review on Amazon.com says: �By examining the destruction of kinship systems, spirituality, and tribal affiliation, the author finds the sources of much of the abuse, alcoholism, and suicide among native people today.�

Not light summer reading � tremendously powerful. Canadian National Bestseller. Winner of 1998 Viacom Canada; Saskatchewan Book Award for Non-Fiction;and others.

(Product Description Excerpt) The controversial national bestseller that received unprecedented media attention, sparked the nation's interest in the plight of children with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, and touched a nerve in all of us. Winner of the 1989 National Book Critics Circle Award.

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About a notorious whiskey trading time and place, north of the Montana border, in Alberta.

In a weave of fiction and non-fiction, Stegner writes about some of the same territory as that covered by �Whoop Up Country,� but with great lyricism and poignant personal memory of the childhood years he spent there, from 1914 to 1920.

(Product Description Excerpt) People in the early stages of alcoholism recovery are often sugar-addicted and nutritionally deficient. Trained chef and recovering alcoholic Liz Scott tackles these issues head on in a cookbook that pursues lifelong sobriety through building a healthy lifestyle around food.

"Discovering an ancient spirituality in a roomful of drunks may seem strange, even paradoxical...".  (Product Description Excerpt) . . . THE SPIRITUALITY OF IMPERFECTION brings together stories from many spiritual and philosophical paths. . . Beyond theory and technique, inside this remarkable book you will find a new way of thinking, a way of living that enables a truly human existence.

(Product Description Excerpt) This book, �weaves together the critical issues of gender relations, religious change, domestic violence, and drinking in highland Chiapas. . . In a new epilogue. . . Christine Eber describes how events of the last decade, including the Zapatista uprising, have strengthened women's resolve to gain greater control over their lives by controlling the effects of alcohol in the community.�

(Product Description Excerpt) . . . a ground-breaking cross-disciplinary study
 using the social, psychological, and scientific literature on alcoholism and family
alcoholism to examine the novels of Hardy, Joyce, and Woolf.

(Product Description Excerpt) The essays both challenge and defend the AA-
Medical Model and draw from African, American, British, French, and Spanish
literatures, exploring the meaning of denial, �addiction,� and the psychological
experiences of addiction.

(Product Description Excerpt) . . . The book records the widespread and persisting ambivalence or hostility in many cultures towards the relation of women with alcohol by reference to religious and social pressures, gender roles and stereotypes and the view of alcohol as a facilitator of unrestrained and 'wanton' behaviour.

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LIBERTY FALLING. Protagonist Anna Pigeon faces her own alcoholism while
working at Ellis Island.

WHEN THE SACRED GINMILL CLOSES. (Product Description) In the dark days,
in a sad and lonely place, ex-cop Matt Scudder is drinking his life away -- and
doing "favors" for pay for his ginmill cronies. But when three such assignments
flow together in dangerous and disturbing ways, he'll need to change his
priorities from boozing to surviving  

BLACK CHERRY BLUES. (Product Description Excerpt) Ex-cop Dave Robicheaux's
His wife had been murdered ... Now they're after his little girl... From the bayou
to Montana's tribal lands,he's running front the bottle, a homicide rap, a professional killer ... and the demons of his past.

Grafton, Sue. Kinsey Millhone series, this particular book has a central character hitting bottm with his alcohol use. 

U IS FOR UNDERTOW: (Book Jacket) Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable. Even more so when Kinsey Millhone's only lead is a grown man dredging up a repressed childhood memory -- of something that may never have happened . . .

Jance, J. A. JP Beaumont mystery series. Beau has struggled through a hard life of
alcoholism and two failed marriages.

NAME WITHHELD. (Book Jacket) Seattle Police homicide detective JP Beaumont
is babysitting his best friend's daughters in his penthouse apartment on a sober New Year's Day when he is called to investigate a body floating in nearby Elliott Bay.

NIGHT PASSAGE. (Product Description Excerpt) As the flagship volume in a new series featuring a complex and engaging sleuth, Night Passage is cause for celebration. After a busted marriage kicks his drinking problem into overdrive and the LAPD unceremoniously dumps him, the thirty-five-year-old Stone's future looks bleak. So he's shocked when a small Massachusetts town called Paradise recruits him as police chief, He can't help wondering if this job is a genuine chance to start over, the kind of offer he can't refuse.

THE ALCOHOLICS. (Product Description Excerpt) Dr. Peter S. Murphy runs a clinic to cure alcoholics. But his charges believe that the only thing that will fix them is another drink. To this bitter struggle of wills, add an orderly who doubles as a quack practitioner, a nurse who is both alluring and ingeniously sadistic, and a misplaced patient whose main problem is his lack of a frontal lobe, and the result is one of Jim Thompson's most harrowingly funny yet deeply sympathetic novels.

(Product Description Excerpt) When theatre director Siddalee Walker
inadvertently reveals some of the less-savory facts of her Louisiana childhood
to the New York Times, the article brands her mother, Vivi, a tap-dancing child
abuser. Vivi virtually disowns Sidda, but Vivi's intrepid gang of lifelong friends,
the Ya-Yas, sashay in and conspire to bring everyone back together. The Ya-
Yas persuade Vivi to send Sidda a scrapbook of their girlhood mementos entitled
Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. . .

(From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Jesse Larsen) Ellen's father is an abusive drunk, her mother a beaten and defeated woman who finally deserts her only child by taking an overdose of drugs. . . Ellen's father's death precipitates a series of disastrous living situations, all described in detail that does not miss the humor possible in human relationships no matter how dismal.

(From the Inside Flap) From one of Britain�s most acclaimed novelists, a comic but terrifying love story about two alcoholics alternately battling and embracing their addiction, and each other.

. . . . "a wickedly shrewd, black-humor riff on the horrors of rehab and the hollows of Hollywood life" (People).

(Product Description Excerpt) Alan Severance wakes up one morning confined to a familiar hospital with no recollection of his arrival. Thus starts RECOVERY. An alcoholic and critically acclaimed Pulitzer prize-winning poet, Berryman jumped to his death off the Washington Bridge in 1972 in Minneapolis, abandoning his own attempts to overcome alcoholism as well as the yet unfinished RECOVERY. The resulting novel is a powerful portrayal of Severance�s eternally indefinite attempts to free himself from the grip of addiction.

(Product Description Excerpt) Writing pseudo-journalistic stories about a war he�d never seen was filling Johnnie Paul�s pockets, but breaking his heart. (Publisher�s Weekly) Johnnie's narration starkly reveals the pain and torture of alcoholism and doomed love.

(Product Description Excerpt) Martin Lambert must come to terms with the aftermath of his brother's suicide. Replaying sad melodies of his affluent youth, Martin embarks on a poignant journey through his family's haunted past -- an unforgettable voyage of self-discovery that leads him from a childhood tainted by shocking parental abuse to a present clouded by alcoholic despair and desperate love - and, ultimately, toward a future of understanding, redemption and hope.

(Publisher�s Weekly) . . .One night, Bojan's wife walked off into a blizzard, never to return -- leaving Bojan to drink too much to quiet his ghosts, and to care for his three-year-old daughter Sonja alone. . . �. (Product Description Excerpt) Thirty-five years later, Sonja returns to Tasmania and a father haunted by memories of the European war and other, more recent horrors. As the shadows of the past begin to intrude ever more forcefully into the present, Sonja's empty life and her father's living death are to change forever.

(Product Description Excerpt) Despite--or because of--her irreverence, faith is a natural subject for Anne Lamott. . . As she puts it, "My coming to faith did not start with a leap but rather a series of staggers." TRAVELING MERCIES tells in exuberant detail how Anne Lamott learned to shine the light of faith on the darkest part of ordinary life, exposing surprising pockets of meaning and hope.

(Product Description Excerpt) Richard Winslow is in a rut. His wife is leaving him, he drinks too much, his once-acclaimed poetry has sunk into obscurity. The offer of a visiting professorship at a small college in Montana hardly seems like the best way to renew his artistic glory.

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Written as if it were a diary, this tells the story of "the Owl," as she grows up
on a reserve in a Northern Ontario along the CNR line. One of her challenges
involves family and community alcoholism.

(Product Description Excerpt) HOUSE MADE OF DAWN, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969, tells the story of a young American Indian named Abel, home from a foreign war and caught between two worlds: one his father's, wedding him to the rhythm of the seasons and the harsh beauty of the land; the other of industrial America, a goading him into a compulsive cycle of dissipation and disgust.

(Author Description) A contemporary story about a Lakota struggling toward recovery from alcoholism.

(From the publisher) Everyone had been drinking that snowy night when Chris's car plunged into the ravine. Luckily, Matt hadn't gone with the group. Now four of his friends are dead. Only Jason survives. Everyone blames Chris for the tragedy, and Matt doesn't like the way people talk about him and harass his family. Matt suspects there's something fishy about the investigation that followed the accident. Was it another case of drunk driving? Or was something more at stake? Matt is determined to uncover the truth, but no one is talking. What really happened that night?

(Excerpt from Product Description) Without even noticing, 15-year-old Katherine has become the head of her household. . .Her single mother, an out-of-work alcoholic, has been in bed for weeks, leaving Katherine and her three younger siblings to band together and fend for themselves. . .And the longer they all struggle to maintain their pretense of normality, the more they have to fear -- and to lose.

(Card catalog description) A teenage boy sees his best friend and fellow band member begin a relationship with a girl who consistently lies and drinks too much.

(From library catalogue description): Sam has been educated in the behavior mode of AO (Alcoholics Offspring) jargon intended to facilitate the counseling of offspring of the more than 67% of American population who are alcoholics in the mid 21st century. At 12, he committed his mom to a treatment center, took custody of his 8 year old brother.

(Product Description Excerpt) Fourteen-year-old Manny Hernandez wants to. . .
be a vato firme, the kind of guy people respect. But that's not easy when your father is abusive, your brother can't hold a job, and your mother scrubs the house as if she can wash her troubles away. (Card catalog description) Manny relates his coming of age experiences as a member of a poor Mexican American family in which the alcoholic father only adds to everyone's struggle.

(Product Description Excerpt) Sixteen-year-old Maggy's life consists of trying to be invisible at school, taking care of her alcoholic mother, and spending all the time she can at the Blue Mirror, a downtown caf� . . . everything changes when she meets Cole, a charismatic runaway . . . As Maggy becomes more entwined with Cole and she looks at him with all her heart, she sees something far more dangerous than she may be capable of handling.

Clearie�s mother was an alcoholic. Now she is living in the village where her mother grew up, where the villagers unite to confront continuing problems with alcoholism and a whiskey runner. (Card catalog description) In 1946, while her emotionally distant father is in occupied Japan, a twelve-year-old girl spends a year with her mother's relatives in a Tlingit Indian village in Alaska and begins  to love and respect her heritage as she confronts the secret of her mother's disappearance.

(Product Descriptions Excerpt) Though very different, the Golds are sisters through and through. . . When the unthinkable happens -- the death of their father -- a year passes in shattered silence . . .The Gold sisters have been changed irrevocably, and they are all but lost to one another, until the key is found. The key to their father's Pontiac Firebird.

(Product Description Excerpt) . . . Danny, ten, dreams of being a basketball star. . . . Here is a heart-felt book about sports, alcoholism, and hard-won family love that delivers an encouraging message and packs a tremendous emotional punch.

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