About this item
While plenty of entertaining books have been written about the history of alcohol and other intoxicants, none have offered a comprehensive, convincing answer to the basic question of why humans want to get high in the first place. Drunk elegantly cuts through the tangle of urban legends and anecdotal impressions that surround our notions of intoxication to provide the first rigorous, scientifically-grounded explanation for our love of alcohol. Drawing on evidence from archaeology, history, cognitive neuroscience, psychopharmacology, social psychology, literature, and genetics, Slingerland shows that our taste for chemical intoxicants is not an evolutionary mistake, as we are so often told. In fact, intoxication helps solve a number of distinctively human challenges: enhancing creativity, alleviating stress, building trust, and pulling off the miracle of getting fiercely tribal primates to cooperate with strangers.
About the Author
I'm Distinguished University Scholar and Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia. I work in a lot of academic areas, including early Chinese thought, comparative religion, cognitive science of religion, virtue ethics, cognitive linguistics and science-humanities integration. My first trade book, Trying Not to Try, was published by Crown/Random House in March 2014. My new book, Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization, is forthcoming from Little, Brown Spark on June 1, 2021. I have also published many academic books, translations, articles and book chapters. For information about my books, articles, teaching and research, please see my personal website: edwardslingerland. com
