(Finan, Christopher M.) Christopher M. Finan is the author of From the Palmer Raids to the Patriot Act: A History of the Fight for Free Speech in America and Alfred E. Smith: The Happy Warrior. He is the executive director of National Coalition Against Censorship and former director of American Booksellers for Free Expression, a program of the American Booksellers Association. Finan presents a social history of alcoholism in the United States, from the seventeenth century to the present day, in Drunks: An American History (Beacon Press). He reveals the history of our struggle with alcoholism and the emergence of a search for sobriety that began among Native Americans in the colonial period, right through to the the dramatic story of Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith, who helped each other stay sober and then created AA.
