Alcoholics Anonymous is one of the most significant self-help books
of the twentieth century with an estimated thirty-seven million
copies sold, translated into seventy languages. Released in 1939,
the Big Book, as it is commonly known, has spawned a number of
recovery communities around the world and remains a vibrant tool in
introducing a plan of recovery from addiction in all its
manifestations. It has been forty years since the last scholarly
history of Alcoholics Anonymous (A.A.), Ernie Kurtz's Not God,
published in 1979. Since then, all books that focus on one or more
aspects of A.A. history have relied almost exclusively on the
anecdotal stories told long after the fact by Bill Wilson and
number of other early members, accounts that have proved at times
to be inaccurate. Writing the Big Book is the result of eleven
years of in-depth research into the formative years of A.A. Granted
unprecedented access to the GSO archive, among others, the author
reveals the inner workings of the early Fellowship, the conflicts,
personalities, failures, and dispels myths of canonical texts such
as Dr. Bob and the Good Old Timers, Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of
Age, and A Brief History of the Big Book. Relying, whenever
possible, on primary, real-time documents, the author pulls various
threads into a remarkably coherent narrative. While the story
focuses primarily on the eighteen months between October 1937 (when
a book was first proposed) and April, 1939 (when Alcoholics
Anonymous was published), relevant events both before and shortly
after those dates are fully incorporated. Across the span of these
eighteen months, the wealth of available archival materials allows
a week-by-week accounting of events, which is presented here
through an amazing amount of previously unreported details in a
comprehensive and compelling story.
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