The Drinking Game

Description

Title: The Drinking Game: How Big Business, the Media and Politicians Shape the Way You Drink
Author: Guyon Espiner
Publisher: Allen & Unwin New Zealand, 2023
Format: Paperback
Condition: Excellent — as new

Description:

One morning, investigative journalist Guyon Espiner woke up after a big night, decided he’d had enough, and quit drinking. No AA. No support groups. Cold turkey. He’d been a heavy-but-managed drinker since his teens — three nights off, four nights on — and the arithmetic had finally stopped adding up.

Not drinking gave him a new way of seeing. The Drinking Game is what he saw.

This is a book about why it always seems like the right time for a drink — why alcohol is present at every celebration and every commiseration, woven into the fabric of work culture, sport, hospitality, friendship, and self-reward. But it is not a memoir of recovery. It’s an investigation. Espiner brings thirty years of political journalism to bear on the industry behind the bottle: the lobbying, the funding of friendly research, the relationships between alcohol companies and the politicians who regulate them, the way media advertising dependencies have historically blunted critical coverage. He examines New Zealand’s heavy drinking culture — among the worst in the developed world — and asks who benefits from keeping it that way.

The result is what Kete Books called “one of the most important NZ books of 2023” — thought-provoking, well-sourced, and never preachy. Patrick Gower, who knows something about the subject, was direct: “This is real, it is raw, and it lays out the truth about booze.” Jack Tame called it “thought-provoking but never preachy.”

The book was longlisted for the General Non-Fiction Award at the 2024 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.

Why We Stock It:

This is investigative journalism doing what it’s supposed to do — making visible the systems that shape daily life and are rarely examined. Alcohol is the socially acceptable drug whose damage is everywhere in Aotearoa, and Espiner is one of the few journalists with the profile, the access, and the personal stake to write about it without flinching. The Gravy exists for exactly this kind of book.