Had occasion last evening to look over James Graham's book, *Vessels of Rage, Engines of Power: The Secret History of Alcoholism* (Lexington: Aculeus Press Inc., 1994). Fascinating stuff. Graham turns Marty Mann upside-down--i.e., by emphasizing the active alcoholic as *victimizer* rather than as *victim* in society. In a particularly succinct passage, Graham writes: "...sick egos seek *power*, and that means they want control over others, over *us*. The eomania, as I will explain, also causes them to behave destructively. Compulsive power-seekers with an urege to destroy are -- it is virtually a definition of the word -- a menace. Most alcoholics are transformed into evil-doers by this 'disease of the total personality'; most commit heinous acts during their drinking years and the evil behavior of some has earned them a place in the history books" (p. 9). Graham's text, though subdivided into various types of evil-doing alcoholics, is one long rogues' gallery--wherein the reader is acquainted or reacquinted with the underlying alcoholism behind (and presumably occasioning) so many of history's notorious traitors, murders, tyrants, and even nasty writers. The latter category--alcohol authors--is familiar territory that Graham reworks with his narrative eye glued to all the petty, hurtful, and destructive tendencies and prose of alcoholic authors. Stalin emerges at the book's end as the super-evil and "supreme alcoholic"--and therefore Graham's moral and paradigmatic capstone of the disease and its carriers. This is a remarkable read for at least two good reasons: (1) because it illuminates the potential moral double-edgedness and potential for opprobrium of even a disease-concept-accepting commentator and (2) because may represent a new and intriguing bellweather in popular culture of alcoholism's shifting meaning in a newly more temperate cultural clime. There is lots of delicious food for thought at different levels in Graham's fast-paced and hard-hitting--if not particularly balanced--attempt to re-vilify alcoholism (or at least *active* alcoholism). -- Ron Roizen voice: 510-848-9123 fax: 510-848-9210 home: 510-848-9098 1818 Hearst Ave. Berkeley, CA 94703 U.S.A. [log in to unmask]