St. Patrick's Day Whiskey Tasting With Bill Dowd

  Few commodities figure as prominently or as intimately in the story of the nation as bourbon whiskey. Bourbon is Dane Huckelbridge's artful and imaginative biography of our most well-liked, and at times controversial, spirit, that is also a witty and entertaining chronicle of the United States itself.

In telling the story of bourbon, Huckelbridge takes us on a lively tour across three hundred years. Introducing the fascinating people central to its creation and evolution, he illuminates the elusive character of the nation itself.

    Tim Federle was a dancer on Broadway until a few years ago. Now he’s an author who has has - so far - released 4 books. (His fifth - a picture book, is due out later this year.) Two of his books, Better Nate Than Ever! and Five, Six, Seven, Nate!, are about Nate Foster - a small-town boy with big Broadway dreams. The books are aimed at middle school theater-geeks trying to find their footing. Better Nate Than Ever! was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, a Publishers' Weekly Best Book of the Year, and a Slate Favorite Book of the Year.

  Federle's other two books are Tequila Mockingbird: Cocktails with a Literary Twist and Hickory Daiquiri Dock: Cocktails with a Nursery Rhyme Twist. The former containing instruction for boozy-bevs with names like Love in the Time of Kahlúa, Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margarita, and Vermouth the Bell Tolls; and the latter sharing shaker-ready recipes for Old MacDonald Had a Flask, Baa, Baa, Black Russian, Jack and Coke (and Jill).

On Thursday, February 5th, the Campaign for the New Hudson Area Library will be hosting Federle at Café Le Perche in Hudson, NY from 6 – 8pm. The restaurant will offer a selection of Federle’s drink recipes for sale to guests and The Spotty Dog Books and Ale, will be selling Federle’s books. 

    In The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Laing examines the link between creativity and alcohol through the work and lives of six extraordinary men: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver.

All six of these writers were alcoholics, and the subject of drinking surfaces in some of their finest work, from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to A Moveable Feast. Often, they did their drinking together: Hemingway and Fitzgerald ricocheting through the cafés of Paris in the 1920s; Carver and Cheever speeding to the liquor store in Iowa in the icy winter of 1973.

Olivia Laing grew up in an alcoholic family herself. One spring, wanting to make sense of this ferocious, entangling disease, she took a journey across America that plunged her into the heart of these overlapping lives. As she travels from Cheever’s New York to Williams’s New Orleans, and from Hemingway’s Key West to Carver’s Port Angeles, she pieces together a topographical map of alcoholism, from the horrors of addiction to the miraculous possibilities of recovery.