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Party Like a President by Brian Abrams

If nothing else, we here at BookTrib feel bound by the sense of decorum that our devotion to books and literature commands. Therefore, I humbly beg your indulgence while I express the following sentiment:

Its SPRING BREAK, baby! Woooo-hooooo!!! PARTY!! PARTY HEARTY, PEOPLE!!!

Thanks. I feel better now.

Actually, I don’t have a lot of experience at partying during Spring Break. Over the course of my college career, when that week off came around each spring and so many of my classmates flew south to make merry on a beach somewhere, I was stuck at my menial job, saving up my meager paychecks in order to keep wheels under me and textbooks in my backpack. So when it comes to breaking decorum to whoop it up a little, I have to admit to being something of a novice.

Fortunately, I know a place where we can all look to learn about both decorum and debauchery: 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the domicile of the President of the United States of America, and home to some of our country’s biggest party animals. And thanks to Party Like a President: True Tales of Inebriation, Lechery, and Mischief from the Oval Office (Workman Publishing, 2015) by Brian Abrams, we have a guided tour of more than 200 years of White House wing-dings.

From the Father of Our Country, George Washington (who routinely plowed through three or four glasses of Madeira during lunch) to our current president, Barak Obama (who, of his high-school days has openly admitted, “when I was a kid, I inhaled. That was the point”), author Brian Adams and illustrator John Mathias treat us to a patriotic parade of presidential partiers. “With stakes so high—assassination attempts, financial crisis, threats of nuclear annihilation—it’s a wonder any of these guys made it out of the White House alive, much less sober,” Adams writes.

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Ulysses S. Grant was famous for riding into battle drunk—so much so that he once vomited all over his horse—but did you know that Harry Truman like to begin each day by throwing back an ounce of Old Grandad in order to “get the engine going”? Herbert Hoover said that cocktail hour was the finest hour of the day, “the pause between the errors and trials of the day and the hopes of the night.” William Howard Taft dealt with the stress of the job by binge-eating a gluttonous supply of lobster stew, stacks of bacon, cheese biscuits, hams, and other comfort foods. FDR, while by all accounts a terrible bartender, insisted on mixing the drinks himself at his famed cocktail parties, and in 1934, in full Animal House spirit, threw himself a toga party in the White House.

Gerald R. Ford used to literally drink his way across the country, enjoying an adult beverage or three on virtually every Air Force One flight. And do you think Chevy Chase’s old Saturday Night Live skits about Ford being clumsy were off the mark? Once, while enjoying martinis with the Press Corps, he accidentally stuck his foot in a wheel of brie—and didn’t even notice. Theodore Roosevelt rarely touched alcohol, but he was so hepped up on coffee (he drank about a gallon a day) and was such an adrenaline junkie that psychiatrists a hundred years later concluded that he may have been struggling with symptoms of bipolar disorder. Mutton-chopped Chester A. Arthur was notorious for his wild all-nighters filled with cigars, food and bourbon. The president was “the last man to go to bed in any company,” according to one of his drinking buddies.

And then, of course, there was JFK. No single paragraph could do justice to Kennedy’s legendary carnal appetites. Let’s just say that the book’s stories of Kennedy’s exploits alone are worth the price of admission.

In every generation, young people like those on the beach during spring break invariably think that they’ve perfected the art of partying. But whether you’re sitting on a beach this spring or sitting in your living room waiting for summer to come, Party Like a President will show you how some of our country’s most notable figures raised the art of partying to truly historic levels.

Buy this Book!

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Party Like a President by Brian Abrams
Genre: Nonfiction
Author: Brian Abrams
Publisher: Workman Publishing
ISBN: 9780761180840
Michael Ruscoe

Michael Ruscoe is a writer, teacher, and musician living in Southern Connecticut. He is the author of the novel, "From the Stray Cat Files: You’ll Do Anything," the anthology, "Baseball: A Treasury of Art and Literature," and numerous educational texts. An instructor at Southern Connecticut State University, Ruscoe is also lead singer and songwriter for the indie band Save the Androids! In his spare time he earns karma for his next life by ardently following the New York Mets. The proud father of two children, Ruscoe also cares for and supports a pair of goldfish, who, in all honesty, are not very good conversationalists.

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