Happy Hours: Alcohol in a Woman's Life

by Devon Jersild

Book Overview

[A] noteworthy examination of women and alcohol delivers compelling personal stories that illuminate previously neglected aspects of this devastating social problem. -- Publishers Weekly

Mixing cutting-edge research with affecting stories of women who struggle with alcohol problems, Happy Hours challenges our assumptions and expands our awareness of the role alcohol plays in women's lives.

In this important...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060929901
• ISBN13: 9780060929909
• Release Date: April 2002
• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Length: 400 Pages
• Weight: 0.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.3" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

One of the top three books for women in recovery

I decided to review the top books that my recovery coaching clients and the members of my San Francisco chapter of Women for Sobriety found helpful. Number One is Sober for Good (Fletcher). Number two is Turnabout (Kirkpatrick). The reason I suspect that Happy Hours only rates number three is that the others are easy reads, heavier on personal story, which God knows we need so much when we are trying to figure out how to get sober. Jersild is helpful when you have detoxed and are trying to understand how you got where you are and what to do next. Jersild has no agenda about what approach works. I find this wonderfully refreshing. If you want to know the next four top books, send me an email, I'm putting a bibliography together.

She wrote the book for her sister, an alcoholic

Happy hours by Devon Jersild, is a book I would recommend to any woman who struggles with drinking at some point in their lives. It is written because AA is tailored towards men. Most recovery programs are, and they are sometimes hard for a woman to grasp the different thinking and tailored approach, alot of twelve step and treatment programs have. We are unique in our disease, and alcohol effects women in different ways then men. This is described in the book, it tells us how we can learn from stories of other women. I gained strength in reading what each woman had gone through. Some of the reading is a little technical about statistics and terminology that would be better suited for a chemical dependancy counselor, but I got through that short part and was able to finish the book.

An Intimate, Heartfelt Book

I read HAPPY HOURS with a growing sense of relief. At last somebody has looked at a serious issue for women with a strong inside view, and with understanding. Jersild's sister was an alcoholic, and she came to this subject from the experience of despair so familiar to member's of an alcoholic's family. Her slow discovery of the complexity of the issue is part of the book's narrative, which looks at this issue from many angles and incorporates myriad voices. This is a thorough study of a horrible problem, and readers who suffer from alcohol abuse or who have members of their families who do will find enlightenment in these pages.

An important study of a major problem

HAPPY HOURS is an important study of a major problem that reads itself like a novel or book of stories. Jersild is a beautiful writer, and she shapes the individual stories of these distressed women with consummate care and a poet's eye for details. The information presented is succinct and useful. This book should be standard reading on the subject for years to come.

Destined to be a Classic

With "Happy Hours," Devon Jersild has taken her place in the front ranks of American social journalism and literary nonfiction. She has identified, researched and brilliantly set forth a topic of urgent concern-women afflicted with alcoholism-that until this book had remained "invisible" as a distinct and singular crisis in our society. The breadth of her scholarship and personal reporting is prodigious. But perhaps the book's true distinction lies in the quality of its prose. Clear, free from fashionable shrillness and polarizing accusation, precisely phrased and hypnotically compelling, it moves us along a powerful narrative line into a terrifying shadow-world previously known only to its suffering denizens and a few of their friends and loved ones. By shining her beacon of compassion and truth into these shadows, Devon Jersild has taken the first step toward alleviating its many sorrows and dangers. This book will stand alongside those of Rachel Carson, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and Simone de Beauvoir in the literature of reclamation.