SOURCE: "Two Lives, One Lost to Alcoholism and the Other Surviving It," in New York Times, June 13, 1996, p. C18.

[In the excerpt below, Lehmann-Haupt states that Knapp's account of her alcoholism "is a remarkable exercise in self-discovery."]

In Drinking: A Love Story, an eloquent account of her own experience with alcohol, [Knapp] writes, "The knowledge that some people can have enough while you never can is the single most compelling piece of evidence for a drinker to suggest that alcoholism is, in fact, a disease, that it has powerful physiological roots, that the alcoholic's body simply responds differently to liquor than a nonalcoholic's."

If the cause of excessive drinking really is physiological, one might wonder what the point is of reading further harrowing accounts of alcoholism's progress: After all, the disease's course has been traced repeatedly in books and movies, many nightmarishly unforgettable. One might almost conclude that...