Aliceheimer’s / How to Drink Like a Billionaire – Cool Tools

Books that belong to paper issue No. 39

Books that belong to paper first appeared online as Wink Books and edited by Carla Sinclair. Register here to receive issues a week early in your inbox.

A SERIES OF POETIC AND ILLUSTRATED VIGNETTES FULL OF HEART AND HUMOR

Aliceheimer’s / How to Drink Like a Billionaire – Cool Tools

Alisheimer: Alzheimer’s disease through the looking glass (graphic medicine)
Dana Walrath
Pennsylvania State University Press
2016, 80 pages, 8.2 x 0.2 x 8.8 inches, paperback

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Elisheimer is Dana Walrath’s touching tribute to her mother Alice, who faced the early regressive stages of Alzheimer’s disease while living with Dana’s family in rural Vermont. Illustrated with a combination of pencil work and collage of text from Alice in Wonderland, Elisheimer is an honest but gentle tale of family care in the face of degenerative disease.

Walrath, a medical anthropologist, first began caricaturing her mother as part of an email exchange in which she and a friend agreed to send each other a drawing a day. Elisheimer evolved into a larger work as part of the Brooklyn Art Library’s Sketchbook Project and evolved into its current form as a self-described work of “graphic medicine.” The book is a collection of poetic vignettes that focus on the wit and personality that persisted while other parts of Alice began to fade. In the book’s introduction, Walrath explains that she painted her mother in part to process the grief she felt at seeing her mother sick, but also to “remember the magic and the laughter” during their life together.

Walrath’s experience with her mother and ability to find humor and absurdity in a sad situation reminds me of my own mother, who often punctuated stories about my grandmother’s struggle with dementia by saying, “As long as she’s happy, I can deal with it.” “Although anyone who lives near this disease is well aware of the dark and difficult problems that are associated with it, Elisheimer maintains a light, respectful tone, preserving Walrath’s fondest memories of Alice’s final days, turning them into entertaining anecdotes while honoring Alice’s dignity. This is an easy read for those who suffer from memory disorders; each page feels like a familiar meditative story. Printed on thick, glossy paper that’s easy on the fingertips and highlights the quality of the illustrations, the book can easily be read in one sitting or read in bits and pieces. Lovingly written and unique in its presentation, Alisheimer’s book is a sentimental read, full of heart and humor.

– Janine Fleury

HOW TO DRINK LIKE A BILLIONAIRE FOR THE ACCIDENTAL CONnoisseur

How to Drink Like a Billionaire: Mastering Wine with the Joy of Living
Mark Oldman
Abrams ComicArts
2016, 256 pages, 7.5 x 1.0 x 9.2 inches, hardcover.

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I love wine, but damn things can get complicated. Reds. White. Vinos. Pino. Terroir. Lactic acid fermentation. Tannins. Oak. So much oak. Do you drink red wine with red meat? Do you drink white in the light, after a quarrel? It’s stunning. I spent a week shadowing the winemaker as he explained almost every detail of the winemaking process, and I still can barely tell the difference between red and white. Red wine is the reddest, right? How to drink like a billionaire does a very good job of demystifying and simplifying wine so that the casual connoisseur and even the seasoned wine drinker can learn a thing or two.

The very first section right after the introduction: “Pleasure is not proportional to the price.” From that moment on I was inside. One of the biggest mistakes that puts people off wine is that you have to spend money to drink good wine. This is absolutely not true, and Mark Oldman wholeheartedly supports this opinion. After that, it does a great job of breaking down anything and everything in the wines. He talks about varietals, terminology, aging, he mentions some unexpected wine pairings, like drizzling the pancakes with a little dessert wine, and that’s just scratching the surface.

The purpose of the book is not to achieve total wine snobbery, but to simply understand wine and get even more pleasure from it. I think Oldman does it very well, with a great sense of humor and lots of fun photography and illustrations. This book is not for teetotalers, but if you are interested in red, white and sparkling, you will enjoy it.

– J.P. Leroux

05.11.24