From Binge to Blackout: A Mother and Son Struggle With Teen Drinking

Introduction by Reverend Edward A. Malloy, President Emeritus of Notre Dame, Board Member, The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse

ALCOHOL: The number one drug of choice for America's youth

Throughout his college years, Toren Volkmann partied like there was no tomorrow. And like so many parents, his mother, Chris, overlooked Toren's growing alcohol problem. But when he graduated, Toren realized that he had become nothing more than a full-blown alcoholic with a college diploma.

Written in alternating chapters from the viewpoints of both mother and son, this is a riveting, enlightening, and heartbreakingly true story of a family that was able to confront the fear, pain, and denial that threatened to destroy them - and survive the epidemic of teenage drinking that is putting America's future at risk.

From Binge to Blackout forces us to look at the choices we are offering our youth: the marketing of alcohol; parents' benign acceptance of heavy youth drinking and ignorance of king-size doses; kids' genetic maps for alcohol dependence; the vulnerable adolescent brain; the labeling of malt liquor forties; and the general nonchalance of government, family and teens towards public drunkenness, liquored-up violence, and the consequences of our alcohol-saturated culture.

From Binge to Blackout festers in the Petri dish of a teen's first drink, and then quickly morphs into a life-destroying rampage. Biting words, both informative and descriptive, identify and address the seductive allure of alcohol and a society chasing its glamour. Mom and son begin the struggle in separate worlds, but by the end of the book, they convince us that we need to work together in dealing with the nation's number one drug of choice: alcohol.