Alcoholics Anonymous: The Big Book, 4th Edition by Anonymous
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Book Reviews of Alcoholics Anonymous: The Big Book, 4th Edition
Book Review: Not self-help
Summary: 5 Stars
Alcoholics as described in this book keep on drinking because they don't know how to stop. In a culture dominated by self-help, I wanted a book to read that will solve my problems. I've read a lot of self-help literature and I have yet to find such a book. There is no "Quitting Drinking for Dummies" because people who can't stop drinking have a hard time admitting they don't know how. I kept thinking "if I only knew how," then I could stop. The truth is I couldn't stop. No amount of knowing will help an alcoholic of my type, because there is no cure that settles the deal.Like other guides for spirituality (such as the Bible), this is not a self-help book. I read Alcoholics Anonymous (first 164 pages) and it didn't help me stop. Then when I started to read it with someone else, I realized that the "self" who wanted "help" was the problem. This isn't just a book about stopping drinking. It's about (among many things) accepting help from other people and allowing yourself to be humbled by admiting you can't do everything by yourself.
Book Review: Well, it saved my life!
Summary: 5 Stars
I don't write reviews but I felt I needed to on this one, I truly believe in this book. The 'Big Book' was given to me by a prison chaplain and I have since read it three times. As I was reading it I was thinking to myself, "Jeez, that's me! I've done that!" This book inspired me to get help for an addiction I really didn't care about. (despite the agony it caused my family and friends.) I have since joined several local AA chapters and and am clean and sober. I am 25 years old and had no problem with the English presented within the text. I believe all addicts should read this book with an open mind and you WILL learn from it. Everybody has a diffrent 'rock-bottom' and I was at mine. Sometimes you have to be at the bottom of the pit to force you to look up. Through this book and AA, I have turned my life completly around. No addict can recover on his own, that's where the "Higher Power" comes in. If you are suffering from addiction, I beg you, at least give this book a chance. It may very well save your life.Book Review: Big Voodoo Spiritual Work
Summary: 5 Stars
This little book is written in a style that contains a dreadful dilating force. Bill W.'s voice is the voice of what Freud called the reality principle; it is the voice of death and as you listen to it it takes a sledgehammer to the glass and tinselly rubbish of your life. The prose style is profoundly quirky, funkadelic, and throbs to the rhythms of an iron heart as it pushes and shoves new blood into your abused and decrepit veins. Sobriety is not a tea-chat. It is not a milk run or a tupper-ware party. It is life and death locked in an rutheless struggle for the future of your body and soul.
This book is not just for alcoholics. It's for any honest spiritual seeker who wants to get blasted into mental health by one of the premier spiritual texts of the twentieth century.
Worthy to stand alongside the great spiritual works of humanity: The Bible, the Koran, the Tao Te Ching, the Dhammapada, the Talmud, the Bhagavad Gita.
I'd give it ten but I'm reduced to giving it only five stars.
Book Review: Give it a Try!
Summary: 5 Stars
I found the volume to be convincing for me, and a wonderful source of suggested directions, where no other existed before, except by fee or conformity. The book claims all humans have some form of emotional and psychological problems and when this is coupled with alcohol abuse the sufferer can feel hopeless and beyond human aid. This text gave me a new type of perspective into my mind and of others around me. The book never claims to be the only perspective. Give it a try. No one will make your decisions for you, that (Thank God or what ever you choose to be a higher power or not to chose or whatever you want, no rules here) you will get to do all on your own. Perhaps thats why many scoff, because the truth is YOURS TO BE FOUND, and it enflames the scoffers emotionally or psychologically. Finally if you are reading this GO TO A MEETING NOW!!!!!!! P.S. that is not a subliminal message for you cult fans. I would of loved to give my name but it's about being anonymous, you know that stuff about ego deflation.Book Review: This book has saved hundreds of thousands of liveslives!
Summary: 5 Stars
This book tells exactly how hundreds of thousands of real alcoholics have been saved from alcoholism. How can anyone be critical of that if it works? Only the stupid, or ignorant can criticize a book which has literally saved so many people from certain death (not to mention the thousands more they could have victimized).
It is truly a miracle, by virtue of all of the people it has saved.
True, there are thousands more who have failed the program of recovery this book details, but in that is the reason. They failed to do exactly what this book directs them to do. The book didn't fail them.
I personally know a few real alcoholics who were on their last legs when this book came into their lives. All who followed and embraced it's teachings are sober. The one who failed at it would not do what it directed him to do. He died eventually with wet brain (the non technical term for Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome).
I implore anyone with drinking problems to get this book and seek out AA.