The Day George Bush Stopped Drinking

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A completely original exploration of abstinence movements in America — from alcohol to sex to meat. Over the last two hundred years, Americans have sworn off alcohol, masturbation, spicy foods, fatty foods, pickles, coffee, tea, drugs, sex, meat, and more. Even now, America is a country of abstainers: eighty percent don’t smoke, forty percent don’t drink, three percent don’t eat meat, and one-third of all public-school students are taught abstinence-only sex education. In this remarkable new book, critically acclaimed author Jessica Warner examines why Americans abstain — and why they want you to abstain.With her trademark wit and stunning prose, Warner shows how abstinence and evangelical Protestantism both burst onto the American scene in the early nineteenth century. At that time abstinence was the ultimate liberal ideal, the handmaiden of abolitionists and feminists who gave up liquor and coffee and pickles and everything else that stood in the way of their campaign to make America the promised land. Today, of course, abstinence is synonymous with social conservatives, with people like Jerry Falwell and George W. Bush. How this change happened goes to the very heart of this provocative and original book.To read The Day George Bush Stopped Drinking is to understand why America has always just said no — and why it always will. Show more