An involving and moving look at the journey from addiction to recovery.
A look at the Twelve Steps of addiction recovery seen through the eyes of mythology.
At the heart of this book is the recovery framework of Alcoholics Anonymous, the Twelve Steps group members follow in their struggle to return to sobriety. The author, writing anonymously, attempts to map the Twelve Steps onto the outline of the hero’s journey as described by Joseph Campbell in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), noting that Bill Wilson, the co-founder of AA and the creator of the Twelve Steps, “reached into the collective unconscious, drew out this archetypal pattern of transformation,” and created “the modern map of recovery.” The author goes through the Twelve Steps one by one, discussing each in detail and drawing comparisons with a roughly equivalent stage of the hero’s journey as described by Campbell. Step 5, for instance, requires an admission “to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.” The author expertly elaborates: “The alcoholic ego wants to turn to what it believes is an easier way of dealing with these defects which doesn’t include self-disclosure,” adding, “These easier, softer ways didn’t work before, and they will certainly not work now.” The book’s organizing conceit is obvious but nonetheless effective. And although the author’s underlying assertion that the recovery process is itself heroic, which is certainly true, the book’s main attraction throughout is the wonderfully sharp and knowing reflections on the nature of addiction and recovery writ more broadly. The device of mapping this onto Campbell is thought-provoking, but it’s the author’s deeply felt plumbing of the “abyss of self” through which every addict must journey that makes the book so unexpectedly gripping. Recovering addicts and alcoholics in particular should read this book, not because they consider themselves heroes (far from it; humility is built into the Twelve Steps), but to find their struggles very eloquently described.
An involving and moving look at the journey from addiction to recovery.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9780757326004
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Health Communications Inc.
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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