The quintessential American Dream is a heartwarming rags-to-riches tale, but a good riches-to-rags story can be just as captivating. Frances Stroh's memoir, Beer Money, chronicles the unraveling of the 150-year-old Stroh Brewing Company, her fourth-generation brewery family and, in the background, its home city of Detroit. Raised among the automobile barons' Grosse Pointe estates, Stroh and her three brothers grew up with private schools, country clubs and world travel. Her father held a token executive sinecure at the family brewery, but she remembers him best as an extravagant collector of antique guns, Martin guitars, Leica cameras and rare books--and as a capricious alcoholic. Although also from a wealthy family, Stroh's mother was a prudent scold always worried about losing money, so she dressed her children in hand-me-downs and shopped at the A&P. Stroh remembers her boarding school experience: "Straight As, varsity teams, good taste in music, and a robust drug habit, that was what landed you on top, socially. Surviving a 'bust' made you legendary."
She describes the dissolution of her family: her parents' divorce and father's remarriage to a gold-digger, her brother Charlie's addiction and accidental death, her brother Bobby's three marriages, and her own divorce and sporadic attempts at creative work. By the 1980s, the company was already failing. In 1999, what was left of it was sold to Miller. The sale proceeds soon dried up, Detroit was in ruins, her father died broke and alone, and Stroh shucked her strangling legacy. With Beer Money, she is on her way to a fresh new writing career--perhaps a riches-to-rags-to-riches story in the making. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.