Tag Archives: Books

A Year in Books/Day 213: Drinking with George

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  • Title: Drinking with George A Barstool Professional’s Guide to Beer
  • Author: George Wendt with Jonathan Grotenstein
  • Year Published: 2009 (Simon Spotlight Entertainment)
  • Year Purchased: September, 2011 (at Oktoberfest Zinzinnati)
  • Source: George Wendt
  • About: George Wendt’s love affair with beer is a thing of epic beauty. Drinking with George is part personal biography and part encyclopedia of beer. It’s a strange combination that pairs as wonderfully as barley and hops. You could really say that he poured his heart and soul into this project. Tee-hee. It’s incredibly funny, informative, and can be read in the time it takes the average person to drink a couple pints of Guinness. It even comes with a bit of real, human romance: his love for his wife Bernadette Birkett (who voiced Vera Peterson on Cheers) is sweet and moving, if nearly as hilarious as his beer-induced exploits.
  • Motivation: The author hawked his book at last year’s Oktoberfest Zinzinnati. Only a humourless, beer-hating twit could resist buying a copy from the man himself.
  • Times Read: 1
  • Random Excerpt/Page 35: “Looking to lighten my load, I packed a leather travel bag I’d overpaid for in Marrakesh with my untouched and completely unnecessary suit and dress shoes. I sent them back to the States via tramp steamer, addressing the bag to my friend Joe Farmar so as not to offend my dad. A few months later, I would try to recover the clothes, only to discover that Joe had torn the suit, the shoes, and even the bag itself to shreds. This was entirely my fault: I hadn’t bothered to include a note, which confused Joe until he put “bag” together with “Marrakesh” and decided that I’d hidden hashish somewhere inside.”
  • Happiness Scale: 10

    George Wendt , with yours truly cropped out.

    George Wendt , with yours truly cropped out.

The Dead Writers Round-Up: 16th-22nd September

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  • Anne Bradstreet died on 9/16/1672. “Authority without wisdom is like a heavy axe without an edge, fitter to bruise than polish.”
  • William Carlos Williams was born on 9/17/1883. “Life is valuable–when completed by the imagination. And then only.”
  • Upton Sinclair was born on 9/20/1878. “All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescapably propaganda; sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda.”
  • Stevie Smith was born on 9/20/1902. “My Muse sits forlorn/She wishes she had not been born/She sits in the cold/No word she says is ever told.”
  • Babette Deutsch was born on 9/22/1895. She graduated from Barnard College in 1917.
  • Mary Roberts Rinehart died on 9/22/1958. “Men deceive themselves; they look back on the children who were once themselves, and attempt to reconstruct them. But they can no longer think like the child…”

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[All images are in the Public Domain and are courtesy of Wikimedia Commons]