A reader who “gets” my message
By the way, I’ve been lending DDD out to my friends, one at a time. My mom has gotten good at identifying alcoholics too. Together we were able to confirm addiction in a friend of the family’s. I suspected him soley based on the fact that he made fun of his wife’s cooking twice at a dinner they invited us to, and a couple weeks later my mom asked his daughter some pointed questions and determined that his drinking is certainly alcoholic. Unfortunately, I don’t know what I can do other than see if his wife (who pretends nothing is wrong) wants to borrow your book.
As for the Kennedy’s, I just finished reading A History of the American People by Paul Johnson, and those Kennedies are such lunatics I immediately thought “wow, they must be alcoholics.” Another book by Paul Johnson, Intellectuals, presents short and sordid biographies of many secular intellectuals who have influenced Western thought, such as Rousseau, Shelley, Tolstoy, Ibsen, Karl Marx, etc. In some of the biographies alcoholism is mentioned but not much is made of it; most of the other biographies are so utterly strange that it’s hard to imagine these people weren’t drug addicts.