Mapping the Social Consequences of Alcohol Consumption: Edited by Harald Klingemanna and Gerhard Gmel. WHO Regional Office for Europe/Kluwer Academic, Dordrecht. 2001, 170pp. hardback, pound44.06. ISBN: 0-79236-740-5

This book is a lightweight, written by some of the real heavyweights of alcohol studies in Europe. That is all the more surprising, since any one of its eleven chapters would easily merit publication as a stand-alone review article in a refereed journal. The problem, of course, is that this book provides comprehensive coverage of an area which is not comprehensively covered. The map is at best a sketch map, containing many areas marked ‘unexplored’. The authors acknowledge that the relationship between bodily health and alcohol consumption is much better studied and understood. We know much about alcohol-related morbidity and mortality. We even know a lot about the health benefits of moderate alcohol consumption, even though those benefits may be no greater than that which could be achieved by exhorting middle-aged men to take half an aspirin a day. But when we examine social consequences, we have …