Living Loaded: Tales of Sex, Salvation, and the Pursuit of the Never-Ending Happy Hour

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Living Loaded: Tales of Sex, Salvation, and the Pursuit of the Never-Ending Happy Hour (eBook) Pub. Date: 2/8/2011 Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
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Living Loaded: Tales of Sex, Salvation, and the Pursuit of the Never-Ending Happy Hour Pub. Date: 2/8/2011 Publisher: Crown Publishing Group

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Overview

Read the book Sammy Hagar calls "kick-ass, balls to the wall rock n roll cranked to ear-bleed levels."

Many people drink, few do it professionally. My name is Dan Dunn and I consume alcohol for a living.

That’s right. I get paid to run around boozing, carousing, and getting into all manner of trouble, all in the name of covering the “adult beverage beat” for one of the most iconic brands on the planet, Playboy.

I hereby invite you to join me, as I conduct “revealing” hotel room interviews with porn stars in LA; go Zip Cat racing in Scotland with Stifler from American Pie; turn the notoriously posh Pebble Peach Wine Tournament into the opportunity for a 3-day bender (thank God for my trusty voice recorder); enjoy whiskey-fueled romantic encounters in alleyways behind East Village watering holes; get forcibly removed from a boxing match at a Vegas casino (thanks to an unfortunate misunderstanding involving lots of liquor, and the flag of Cuba); get dumped by my stripper/med student girlfriend (mid-lap dance, no less) simply for not being "husband material;” wake up naked on a big-shot Hollywood producer’s living room floor; and learn, the hard way, why NEVER to order an Irish car bomb in a Dublin pub.

Along the way, I’ll share with you the hard-won wisdom from a life lived loaded, including how to amass a kick-ass collection of bar memorabilia, to how to be Yankee and survive bars in the sticks, to how to maintain the perfect buzz during air travel. And for those of you really serious about cocktails, I’ve even included 16 original recipes created just for this book by the world's best-known practitioners of the mixocological arts. You can thank me later.

A bawdy barroom confessional that leaves no shot glass un-shot, no beer un-chugged, no potential paramour un-hit-upon, this is the most entertaining and honest book about the Drinking Life ever written. At least, ever written by me.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

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. (Feb.)

Kirkus Reviews

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" forPlayboy. 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780307718471
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Publication date: 2/8/2011
Pages: 288
Sales rank: 493,826
Product dimensions: 5.14 (w) x 7.96 (h) x 0.63 (d)

Meet the Author

Dan Dunn is the incorrigible if slightly wobbly fellow who pens the enormously popular “Imbiber” column for Playboy Enterprises. A long-time journalist and raconteur, his work has appeared in GQ, USA Today, Maxim, and the LA Times. Dan is a weekly guest on the Playboy Radio Morning Show on Sirius/XM satellite radio, and former staff writer for the Emmy-nominated Talk Soup. He lives in Marina Del Rey, CA, with his many demons, and is survived by countless ex-girlfriends, his mother, dad, three brothers and two sisters… which would be true if he were dead. Dan chronicles his adventures at www.theimbiber.net

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