Living Loaded

November 29, 2010
Playboy columnist Dunn gives readers a double shot of his louche adventures, and mixes them with an extensive list of cocktail recipes. Dunn's drinking junkets take him everywhere there's booze, from Dublin pubs to New Orleans, Palm Springs to Pebble Beach. Along the way he blacks out, hooks up, and engages in a fair amount of offensive behavior. In chapters divided into brief, often numbered sections, Dunn offers advice on how to one-up wine snobs, hang out with rock stars, and impress pretty girls. He also tries to address the trauma of his difficult upbringing by troubled parents. Dunn describes a frat boy's dream life—what 20-year-old Phi Beta Kappa wouldn't love to play celebrity golf tournaments and get dating advice from Tommy Lee? Dunn is over 40, however, and the men's magazine bloviating—complete with endless name-dropping and perfunctory self-loathing—barely covers a brittle defensiveness. When Dunn turns toward more serious material—relationship problems, his father's alcoholism, his mother's mental illness—he unfortunately decides to take a false macho approach. Still, the cocktail recipes look pretty tasty.

November 15, 2010

Fitfully amusing, ultimately annoying account of schmoozing and drinking on the liquor industry's dime.

As Dunn never tires of proclaiming, he has a job many men would envy: "I get paid to crisscross the globe covering the adult beverage beat" for Playboy. His book blends memoir elements concerning his hardscrabble upbringing with magazine-style lists and primers (e.g. "Hangovers and How to Beat Them") and, cleverly, 16 original cocktail recipes provided by esteemed professionals like Dale DeGroff. Dunn is at his most engaging when he's humorously self-deprecating—readers may sense angst and self-doubt beneath his lucky-dog façade—or revealing cynical truths about the hedonism industry. "We booze journalists like to tell ourselves that we're arbiters of some kind of high-minded gourmet sensibility," he writes. "But the truth is the only reason we write about the good stuff is because rich people like to get fucked up on the good stuff, and they need someone to tell them about it." Unfortunately, Dunn is not the sharpest writer, and he seems too preoccupied with his Playboy lifestyle to care—why craft prose that's engaging or effective when you can brag about boorish behavior in Vegas and friendships with adult actresses and Tommy Lee? This results in a structurally incoherent, rambling narrative peppered with cardboard characters, constant asides that pierce the fourth wall and random repetition (an extended anecdote about having anal sex with an emotionally damaged woman by a Dumpster doesn't really improve via emphasis). The book is replete with the misogyny of baffled adolescents (the women here are either unattainable nostalgic dreams or pornographic tramps) and downright hypocrisy (he mocks live-music venues and serious cocktail bars as pretentious, which clearly doesn't apply to his industry pals who provided the drink recipes). By the time he gets around to bragging about his friendship with the late Hunter Thompson, readers will wonder why the author hasn't developed the slightest insight into what made Thompson's nonfiction special. Regardless, men who actually still read Playboy and Tucker Max fans may find this vicariously exciting.

Like a bender—starts out promisingly, becomes increasingly regrettable.

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

December 1, 2010
The author of Playboy.coms Imbiber column is proud of his vocation, reminding us repeatedly that he drinks for a living. As we noted in our review of Nobody Likes a Quitter (2007), though Dunn also enjoys comparing himself to his late mentor, Hunter S. Thompson, hes like Thompson without the political awareness, righteous indignation, and satirical genius: in short, hes a guy whos good at partying. But, given this books title, hes not really promising anything else. He is a good storyteller, lacing his often tongue-in-cheek advice about the boozing life with outr' anecdotes and even somewhat sober introspection. And his advice about drinking is refreshingly unpretentious, which makes the 15 cocktail recipes from prominent mixologists seem somewhat misplaced. Though they may taste delightful, few of them will be accomplished by mere mortals without a scavenger hunt at high-end liquor stores. This sometimes slapdash compendium (much of it taken from his columns) has its moments but will be most avidly consumed by those who share the authors own awe at his job: Dude, you drink for a living?(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)