Books in Brief: Time Is All We Have

Time Is All We Have: Four Weeks at the Betty Ford Center, by Barnaby Conrad (Arbor House, 272 pp., $17.95)

Those who have no reason to fear any possibility that they may be alcoholics or latent alcoholics can skip this book, provided they accept the risk of skipping a book written by Barnaby Conrad. He has written 17 since his initial best-seller, Matador, which plays a narrative role in this illuminating autobiography of an alcoholic who has been “cured,” a word one properly puts inside quotation marks because alcoholics (I was one; I am, technically, still one, even if 27 years have gone by since I tasted the stuff) are never cured, they simply learn that they are happier—yes, happier—not drinking. The story told by Barnaby Conrad, with his usual felicity of expression, recounts what he had been afraid to face before that critical day when his son presented him with a check sufficient to cover his expenses ($6,000) at the Betty Ford Center, a spectacularly successful detoxifier of body and soul, which has graduated such luminaries as Liza Minnelli, Elizabeth Taylor, Tony Curtis, and Robert Mitchum, and uses the basic procedures of Alcoholics Anonymous. Why then six thousand bucks, when AA is free, and available around the clock? “Betty Ford gives you the equivalent of about two years of AA in one month,” Conrad writes. This is an engrossing account of the means by which an unhealthy habit at best (drunks get such things as cirrhosis of the liver), a calamitous tragedy at worst (drunks run over people, including wives and children) is extruded from the system by those who are confident that when the patient experiences health, he/she will experience the joys of deliverance. A fine book, told by an artist who, approaching age 63, decided to be reborn, a gift to himself, and to the literary and artistic community.

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Charles Wallen Jr.

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Time Is All We Have: Four Weeks at the Betty Ford Center, by Barnaby Conrad (Arbor House, 272 pp., $17.95)

Those who have no reason to fear any possibility that they may be alcoholics or latent alcoholics can skip this book, provided they accept the risk of skipping a book written by Barnaby Conrad. He has written 17 since his initial best-seller, Matador, which plays a narrative role in this illuminating autobiography of an alcoholic who has been “cured,” a word one properly puts inside quotation marks because alcoholics (I was one; I am, technically, still one, even if 27 years have gone by since I tasted the stuff) are never cured, they simply learn that they are happier—yes, happier—not drinking. The story told by Barnaby Conrad, with his usual felicity of expression, recounts what he had been afraid to face before that critical day when his son presented him with a check sufficient to cover his expenses ($6,000) at the Betty Ford Center, a spectacularly successful detoxifier of body and soul, which has graduated such luminaries as Liza Minnelli, Elizabeth Taylor, Tony Curtis, and Robert Mitchum, and uses the basic procedures of Alcoholics Anonymous. Why then six thousand bucks, when AA is free, and available around the clock? “Betty Ford gives you the equivalent of about two years of AA in one month,” Conrad writes. This is an engrossing account of the means by which an unhealthy habit at best (drunks get such things as cirrhosis of the liver), a calamitous tragedy at worst (drunks run over people, including wives and children) is extruded from the system by those who are confident that when the patient experiences health, he/she will experience the joys of deliverance. A fine book, told by an artist who, approaching age 63, decided to be reborn, a gift to himself, and to the literary and artistic community.