false3995730091547105978009154710310330Everyday Drinking
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/399573.Everyday_Drinking
13078Kingsley Amis310247500falseThu Jun 12 00:00:00 -0700 2008Wed Jan 07 14:36:03 -0800 2009Wed Jan 07 14:39:51 -0800 2009
STOP SMILING review of Everyday Drinking:
Like Death, the Hangover has regretfully confounded the scientific community in its efforts to develop a satisfactory cure. This fact has not stopped thousands of amateurs from prescribing imaginative remedies, suggesting that hangovers remain less an evil to be vanquished than a fruitful topic of conversation among quaffers, given that they can in fact be avoided simply by not drinking too much.
The subject has likely never received as detailed and philosophical a consideration as in Kingsley Amis’ 1972 text On Drink. It has recently been republished by Bloomsbury, alongside his other musings on drinking, as a single, neat and very dry volume entitled Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis. A prodigiously talented writer and legendary drinker in his own right, Amis could conveniently draw on a well of personal experience. Hilary Rubinstein, the literary agent who commissioned Amis’ best-known novel, Lucky Jim, later wrote, “I queried Kingsley about the plausibility of his central character, Jim Dixon, consuming 10 pints at the local on the Welch weekend, knowing that two was about my limit. Kingsley gave me a pitying look: I was never going to be much of a drinking companion for him.”