An accessible, well-written, and authoritative account that should help demystify AA for a broad range of readers.
An expert in addiction medicine explains how Alcoholics Anonymous works, from the perspectives of personal experiences and scientific research.
Galanter (Spirituality and the Healthy Mind, 2005, etc.) is a professor of psychiatry, director of the Division of Alcoholism and Drug Abuse at the New York University School of Medicine, and past president of the American Society of Addiction Medicine and the American Academy of Addiction Psychiatry. Not an addict himself, Galanter has written previous books on addiction and treatment as well as on cults, faith healing, and spirituality. This background makes him especially well-suited to examine AA, the Twelve Steps program of recovery that centers on turning one’s will over to a higher power. This scholarly but approachable work is written for three audiences: people with substance abuse problems who wonder whether AA can help; family and friends of addicts; and health professionals who want a clear explanation of the AA fellowship. Part I discusses AA’s origin and evolution, controversies—particularly about the role of God or a higher power—and whether alcoholism is a disease. Part II examines the AA experience, including the steps, sponsorship, and spiritual awakenings (for some an awakening “is sudden and dramatic, and for others it comes on more gradually”). In Part III, Galanter considers AA as part of addiction treatment, the role of rehabs, and the overall question of the program’s effectiveness. Throughout, the author includes personal accounts by people in and out of recovery, a diverse set of experiences that sheds light on how AA works in practice. Well-informed and engaging, this volume backs up its observations and anecdotal accounts with evidence from research. This can yield surprising results: for example, patients in a study ranked spiritually oriented items as most important to their recovery, while their health professionals ranked these elements the lowest. Galanter is particularly insightful on spiritual awakening, showing the diversity of this experience, its importance to recovering addicts, and how it can be understood psychologically. His fair-minded approach also contrasts AA with other recovery methods and discusses AA’s limitations, such as treatment issues with addicts who are mentally ill.
An accessible, well-written, and authoritative account that should help demystify AA for a broad range of readers.Pub Date: May 30, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-19-027656-0
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Elegant essays marked by surprising shifts and unexpected connections.
Largely autobiographical meditations and wanderings through landscapes external and internal.
National Book Critics Circle Award–winner Solnit (River of Shadows: Edward Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, 2003, etc.) roams through a large territory here. The book cries out for an explanatory subtitle: “field guide” shouldn’t be taken as a literal description of these eclectic memories, keen observations and provocative musings. Four of Solnit’s essays have the same title, “The Blue of Distance,” but the first segues from the blue in Renaissance paintings to a turquoise blouse the author wore as a child, then to the blue of distance seen on a walk across the drought-shrunken Great Salt Lake. The second presents Cabeza de Vaca, a Spanish explorer who wandered for years in the Americas, and then several white children taken captive by Indians; their stories demonstrate that a person can cease to be lost not only by returning, but also by turning into someone else. The third blue essay explores the world of country and western music, full of tales of loss and longing. The fourth introduces the eccentric artist Yves Klein, who patented the formula for his special electric blue paint and claimed to be launching a new Blue Age. How does it all fit in? Don’t ask, just enjoy, for Solnit is a captivating writer. Woven in and out of these four pieces and the five others that alternate with them are Solnit’s immigrant ancestors, lost friends, former lovers, favorite old movies, her own dreams, the house she grew up in, harsh deserts, animals on the edge of extinction and abandoned buildings. All become material for the author’s explorations of loss, losing and being lost.
Elegant essays marked by surprising shifts and unexpected connections.Pub Date: July 11, 2005
ISBN: 0-670-03421-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The memoir of George Dawson, who learned to read when he was 98, places his life in the context of the entire 20th century in this inspiring, yet ultimately blighted, biography. Dawson begins his story with an emotional bang: his account of witnessing the lynching of a young African-American man falsely accused of rape. America’s racial caste system and his illiteracy emerge as the two biggest obstacles in Dawson’s life, but a full view of the man overcoming the obstacles remains oddly hidden. Travels to Ohio, Canada, and Mexico reveal little beyond Dawson’s restlessness, since nothing much happens to him during these wanderings. Similarly, the diverse activities he finds himself engaging in—bootlegging in St. Louis, breaking horses, attending cockfights—never really advance the reader’s understanding of the man. He calls himself a “ladies’ man” and hints at a score of exciting stories, but then describes only his decorous marriage. Despite the personal nature of this memoir, Dawson remains a strangely aloof figure, never quite inviting the reader to enter his world. In contrast to Dawson’s diffidence, however, Glaubman’s overbearing presence, as he repeatedly parades himself out to converse with Dawson, stifles any momentum the memoir might develop. Almost every chapter begins with Glaubman presenting Dawson with a newspaper clipping or historical fact and asking him to comment on it, despite the fact that Dawson often does not remember or never knew about the event in question. Exasperated readers may wonder whether Dawson’s life and his accomplishments, his passion for learning despite daunting obstacles, is the tale at hand, or whether the real issue is his recollections of Archduke Ferdinand. Dawson’s achievements are impressive and potentially exalting, but the gee-whiz nature of the tale degrades it to the status of yet another bowl of chicken soup for the soul, with a narrative frame as clunky as an old bone.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50396-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
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