OFF THE SAUCE.

By Lewis Meyer '34.Garden City: Doubleday & Company, Inc.,1967. 166 pp. $1.95.

This is the biography of a man who, helped by Alcoholics Anonymous, quit drinking. According to the blurb, it is "a pungent, witty account of one man's fight with booze." The opening sentence describes the book as being "as loose as a goose and immensely personal." In the final sentence of the first chapter, "Ground Rules," the author has only this one little piece of advice, "If you have to get sick on somebody'sliving room rug, make it an Oriental." Such jocosity with little effort towards taste or gentility is often intensified.

How to spot an alcoholic? Scotch drinkers unconsciously dilate the pupils of their eyes and purse their lips when a drink is being poured. Bourbon drinkers roll their eyes and snicker. Vodka drinkers show no emotion at all. The heads of gin drinkers list to the left.

At A.A. meetings the feeling is that of Love, the kind Jesus had in mind when he said, "Love one another." In a Knights of Columbus hall filled with tobacco smoke and A.A. men and women, Mr. Meyer feels that he is in a great cathedral. Nonetheless A.A. members wanting to laugh are full of stories about liquor and drunks, some corny, some stupid, some funny, some off-color.

Despite the facetious tone pervading the book, it is fundamentally serious. The author describes it as his "love song to Alcoholics Anonymous." Everything worth while in his life he owes to A. A. In exonerating himself for breaking the "sacred" rule about keeping his identity secret, he explains that he mulled over the problem with A.A. friends and then turned it over to God, who told him to go ahead.

The author's greatest reward would be from someone's picking up the book "for kicks. .. and deciding that if A.A. has done so much for Lewis Meyer it could be equally efficacious for him or her."