Note Found in a Bottle

Rating:
Summary: Just plain bad
Review: The autobiographical drinking story has been done many times before, so the subject matter here is nothing new.

What's so striking different about this book is that there is almost no self-reflection. It's just a compilation of what Susan Cheever drank, the places Susan Cheever drank, the men Susan Cheeer screwed while she was drunk. We'd get much the same result of Susan had gone to Kitty Kelley and asked "Will you write a shallow, vapid account of my life?"

Note Found In a Bottle is self-absored and boringly so. I imagine what keeps Susan awake at night is that most people have found this account of her drinking years Not Very Interesting. She earnestly wants the reader to believe her life was glamourous, but in fact it's just an average drunk story.

I guess there are worse ways to spend (money) than to throw it away on this book....but not many.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: There can be no contesting that this book was well-written, compelling, and honest. What seems to peeve some is the fact that she came from wealth, and that she had troubled relationships. This has nothing to do with the quality of her book, which is superb. I will seek out other works by this author, and I applaud her honesty, her candor, and her finely honed skills. I hope she is not deterred by the cruelty innate in this forum, or by the bitterness of the obscure and the judgemental. Cheever inherited more than alcoholism from her father: she inherited his craft. Well done.

Rating:
Summary: Should be 'My Life as a Name Dropper'
Review: This book is a huge disappointment. I kept reading it because I kept expecting it to get better, to have a point, to go somewhere. It's an example of really bad writing by a woman whose ego keeps getting in the way of what could be an interesting story. I was hoping to find a book I could recommend to someone who is trying to stay sober; instead I will tell her to run as fast and as far from this drivel as possible. The one positive thing I've gotten from it? If this woman can be published, there's hope for me!

Rating:
Summary: Bad, bad, bad
Review: This book is an enormous waste of paper. My personal review is short, because this "book" deserves little attention.

How many ways can one say "BAD"? This book should have never been published. It's dull, flat, ho-hum. My father was an alcoholic and my husband's father was also an alcoholic. This mess of a book gives exactlly zero insight or perspective. She should be ashamed of herself. An appauling book, don't buy it.

Rating:
Summary: The Writer's Drive to Drinking...and Fame.
Review: This short chronicle of a lifetime's drinking leaves the reader numbed by the illogic of it all .Cheever says her judgement and memory were damaged by steady ,daily drinking. Yet, though her brain was pickled most of the time, she appears to have become a star writer,with publishers and Hollywood eagerly buying what she had to offer . Does this mean that the successful American writer,such as Cheever, can also be a hard drinker ? Does it mean that hard drinking never interrupts the stream of saleable words? Cheever's book does not solve the mystery . The subtitle of this book is :" My Life as a Drinker ". Yet,parallel to the alcohol intake is a life of uninterrupted financial success. Moreover,Cheever is a champion name dropper,who suggests that other financial succcessful writers in her life were also champion drinkers .Something does not click here. A non-drinking reader can only conclude that while drinking may destroy the brain, it never interrupts the flow of publishers' contracts.Read Cheever's book to get a taste of Cheever's ego.But this volume raises a big question about Cheever's purpose. Much of the name -dropping -- Cheever says she met mostly stars on the way up the ladder to great financial success --were addicted to alcohol,too . Yet, nobody in the Cheever universe ever gets setback financially through alcohol. That's not the way it works in real life .

Rating:
Summary: Distressingly bad.
Review: This was such a disappointment. My major complaint is that so little of the book deals directly with her drinking problem. She also has an annoying tendency to interject a new topic almost in mid-sentence. I agree with another reviewer who said read "Drinking: A Love Story" if you want to read a good book about this subject.

Rating:
Summary: Post - it in a Bottle
Review: Though "Note" is neither deep or introspective, it was easy to read with occasional excellent lines. My favorite (which made the whole book worth it for me) was "It's not that I had a miserable childhood -- I didn't -- it's that I was a miserable child."

The memoir is interesting in its very ordinariness: except for her father's fame which gave her access to more wealthy and famous people, her life, her affairs, her alcoholism and her recovery were unremarkable.

Though I enjoyed this book, it was more like an after-school special on the dangers of alcohol (you will forget things, have big fights, and sleep with many men) than an illustration of alcoholism or even the life of Susan Cheever. She admits some things, such as God, and apparently her feelings about her father, are "too private" to explain. Perhaps so, but then why write a memoir?

Rating:
Summary: Post - it in a Bottle
Review: Though "Note" is neither deep or introspective, it was easy to read with occasional excellent lines. My favorite (which made the whole book worth it for me) was "It's not that I had a miserable childhood -- I didn't -- it's that I was a miserable child."

The memoir is interesting in its very ordinariness: except for her father's fame which gave her access to more wealthy and famous people, her life, her affairs, her alcoholism and her recovery were unremarkable.

Though I enjoyed this book, it was more like an after-school special on the dangers of alcohol (you will forget things, have big fights, and sleep with many men) than an illustration of alcoholism or even the life of Susan Cheever. She admits some things, such as God, and apparently her feelings about her father, are "too private" to explain. Perhaps so, but then why write a memoir?

Rating:
Summary: Easy and fast style to read but lacking content.
Review: Unless you're interested in this particular family, time and money could be better spent with a good magazine article of your choice.

Rating:
Summary: Even the Children of the Rich and Famous Can be Alcoholics
Review: Unlike most of the other reviews, I did like this book. However, it is true that it was superficial - Cheever has an equally "addictive" problem with men, in my book, but doesn't really examine it. Also, I learned a lot reading about her father's recovery from alcoholism, but she should have examined this more in depth. I did like the early part of the book where I was educated about the early settlers of our country, and how booze was so VERY important to them. A much better-written examination of a female alcoholic is the book: Drinking: A Love Story. That book was excellent, from beginning to end. However, there were a few stand-outs in this book: whenever I drink champagne, I always remember what Cheever said, that she thought it wasn't really booze, so that therefore she wasn't really an alcoholic, "because it was bubbly". As a non-alcoholic, these comments showed me the "illogical logic" of an alcoholic.