Product Description
Hard cover reproduction of the first printing of the first edition of Alcoholics Anonymous.
An affordable reproduction of the original Big Book®.
Includes a reproduction of the original dustjacket.
Compared to the original this reproduction has the same content and appearance but is not as thick.
“Reproduction published by The Anonymous Press” has been added to the book cover, dustjacket and title page.
®”Big Book” has been registered as a trademark by AA World Service Inc.
#1 by Zulu Warrior on November 11, 2009 - 10:41 pm
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1. The Twelve Steps do not work as a program of recovery from drug or alcohol problems.
o The A.A. failure rate ranges from 95% to 100%. Sometimes, the A.A. success rate is actually less than zero, which means that A.A. indoctrination is positively harmful to people, and prevents recovery. Some tests have shown that even receiving no treatment at all for alcoholism is much better than receiving A.A. treatment:
o One of the most enthusiastic boosters of Alcoholics Anonymous, Professor George Vaillant of Harvard University, who is also a member of the Board of Trustees of Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc. (AAWS), showed by his own 8 years of testing of A.A. that A.A. was worse than useless — that it didn’t help the alcoholics any more than no treatment at all, and it had the highest death rate of any treatment program tested — a death rate that Professor Vaillant himself described as “appalling”. While trying to prove that A.A. treatment works, Professor Vaillant actually proved that A.A. kills. After 8 years of A.A. treatment, the score with Dr. Vaillant’s first 100 alcoholic patients was: 5 sober, 29 dead, and 66 still drinking.
(Nevertheless, Vaillant is still a Trustee of Alcoholics Anonymous, and he still wants to send all alcoholics to A.A. anyway, to “get an attitude change by confessing their sins to a high-status healer.” That is cult religion, not a treatment program for alcoholism.)
o The A.A. dropout rate is terrible. Most people who come to A.A. looking for help in quitting drinking are appalled by the narrow-minded atmosphere of fundamentalist religion and faith-healing. The A.A. meeting room has a revolving door. The therapists, judges, and parole officers (many of whom are themselves hidden members of A.A. or N.A.) continually send new people to A.A., but those newcomers vote with their feet once they see what A.A. really is. Even A.A.’s own triennial surveys, conducted by the A.A. headquarters (the GSO), say that:
X 81% of the newcomers are gone within 30 days,
X 90% are gone in 3 months, and
X 95% are gone at the end of a year.
That automatically gives A.A. a failure rate of at least 95%. But the GSO does not count all of those people who only attend a few meetings before quitting — they don’t qualify as “members”. (That amounts to “cherry-picking”.) If we included them, then the numbers would be much worse.
And also note that the claimed five percent of A.A. newcomers who are still left after one year is exactly the same number as the usual rate of spontaneous remission among alcoholics — five percent per year. That is, in any randomly-selected population of alcoholics, approximately five percent per year will finally get sick and tired of being sick and tired, and they will just quit drinking. And the Harvard Medical School says that 80% of those successful quitters do it by themselves, alone, without any “treatment program” or any “support group”.
If we subtract the normal spontaneous remission rate for alcoholism of five percent per year from A.A.’s claimed success rate of five percent, we get zero for A.A.’s real effective cure rate.
A.A. does not actually make anybody quit drinking; it just takes the credit for the people who were going to quit anyway. A.A. is just taking the credit for peoples’ efforts to save their own lives.
o The Twelve Steps are actually a hopelessly bad program for recovery:
X Cult religion is not a good cure for alcoholism, and A.A. most assuredly is a cult religion.
X One of the biggest problems with the Twelve-Step program is the learned helplessness caused by the First Step, where people are taught to confess that they are “powerless over alcohol.” This leads many people to believe that once they have a drink, that a full-blown relapse and total loss of self-control is inevitable and unavoidable. So some people go on suicidally-intense binges, thinking that it is pointless to try to resist temptation.2 —
X Step Two is just as bad: it teaches people that they are insane, and that only a Supernatural Being can restore them to sanity — which means that they are helpless, and cannot heal themselves.
X Then Step Three teaches a lifestyle of infantile narcissism and passive dependency, where A.A. members turn control of their wills and their lives over to “the care of God as we understood Him”, and then they expect God to take care of them and run their lives for them, and solve all their problems, and wait on them hand and foot, and do all of the hard work for them from then on…
“Let Go And Let God”
is their official motto, their lifestyle, and their approach to problem-solving.
X Then Steps Four through Ten induce guilt in the members by forcing members to make lists of all of their sins and flaws, and “defects of character” and “moral shortcomings”, and confess every intimate dirty little secret to another A.A. member who isn’t even ordained clergy, or even sworn to secrecy.
X In Step Eleven you are supposed to “channel” God and receive psychic work orders and power.
X Then Step Twelve tells you to go recruiting, to draft more alcoholics into this madness.
o There is also experimental evidence that the A.A. teachings about powerlessness lead to binge drinking. In a controlled study of A.A.’s effectiveness, court-mandated offenders who had been sent to A.A. for several months were engaging in five times as much binge drinking as the no-treatment control group which got no A.A. “help”.
o A.A. boosters and propagandists constantly repeat the Big Lie that A.A. works great, and A.A. with its Twelve Steps is the way that everybody recovers.
Rating: 1 / 5
#2 by Melissa Clement on November 12, 2009 - 12:53 am
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THE SELLER ADVERTISEMENT SAID THIS WAS A HARDCOVER BOOK. WHEN I GOT MY SHIPMENT IT WAS A SOFTCOVER. THAT IS WHY I ORDER THE BOOK TO GET IT IN HARDCOVER. I DON’T LIKE DOING BUSINESS WITH SOMEONE THAT DOSE THIS TO HIS BUYERS. I WOULD TELL PEOPLE NOT TO DO BUSINESS WITH THEM BECAUSE YOU DON’T GET WHAT YOU THINK YOU HAVE ORDED.
LISA CLEMENT
DICKSON, TENN
Rating: 1 / 5
#3 by C. Brown on November 12, 2009 - 2:51 am
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Great to see this First Printing of the First Edition! There is a small, yet unmistakably important difference between the First Edition and the following 3 – that is, the Dr.’s Opinion was originally positioned starting on Page 1. Somehow, in the second edition, and the following 2, this chapter was moved to the xxi’s (preface) and I am convinced that in doing so, the importance of the physical allergy has been lost. Early in Bill W.’s recovery, he was having little success helping other alcoholics achieve sobriety. He told Dr. Silkworth about his concerns, and “Silky” answered, “Bill, you have to hit them with the facts!” The message as we know, must have depth and weight! I am afraid, that by moving the Dr’s Opinion into the preface, we have lost the “punch” – I don’t know about anyone else, but I start reading on page 1, and often skip that boring old preface stuff! To any AA member, or friend of AA, please buy this book and point out in your groups and to your sponsees, that a clear understanding of the problem is the only way that the rest of the steps can be fully integrated. Let’s get back to basics and see if we can’t revive recovery rates back to what they were!!
Rating: 5 / 5
#4 by k. anonymous on November 12, 2009 - 5:40 am
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The first edition of the AA “big book” is an interesting look into the members who started AA. The contributors speak with an intensity that is missing in some of the more recent editions.
kathleen
Rating: 5 / 5
#5 by Anonymous on November 12, 2009 - 6:38 am
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TITLE
ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS
AUTHOR
Alcoholics Anonymous
World Services, Inc.
New York City
PUBLISHER
A.A. World Services, Inc.
Printed In the United States Of America
COPYRIGHT
Library of Congress
Catalog Card No. 76-4029
Sixteen printings from 1955-1974
Third Edition, New and Revised, 1976
Sixty-fourth printing 1999
Large-print edition 1990
Seventeenth printing 1999
This is the third edition of the book “Alcoholics Anonymous”. The first edition appeared in April 1939, and in the following sixteen years, more than 300,000 copies went into circulation. The second edition, published in 1955, reached a total of more than 1,150,000 copies.
Because this book has become the basic text for our Society, and has helped such large members of alcoholic men and women to recovery, there exists a sentiment against any radical changes being made in it.
Therefore, the first portion of this volume, describing the A.A. recovery program, has been left untouched in the course of revisions made for both the second, and the third editions.
The section called “The Doctor’s Opinion” has been kept intact just as it was originally written in 1939 by the late Dr.William D. SilkWorth, our Society’s great medical benefactor.
The second edition added the appendices, the Twelve Traditions, and the directions for getting in touch with A.A. But the chief change was in the section of personal stories, which was expanded to reflect the fellowship’s growth. “Bill’s Story”, “Doctor Bob’s Nightmare”, and one other personal history from the first edition were retained intact; three were edited and one of these was retitled; new versions of two stories were written, with new titles; thirty completely new stories were added; and the story section was divided into three parts, under the same headings that are used now.
In this third edition, Part 1 (”Pioneers of A.A.”) stands unchanged. Nine of the stories in Part 11 (”they stopped in time”) are carried over from the second edition; eight new stories have been added. In Part 111 (”They Lost Nearly All”), eight stories have been retained; five are new.
All changes made over the years in the Big Book (A.A. Member’s fond nickname for this volume) have had the same purpose:
To represent the current membership of Alcoholics Anonymous more accurately, and there by to reach more alcoholics. If you have a drinking problem, we hope that you may pause in reading one of the forty-four personal stories and think: “Yes, that happened to me”, or, more important, “Yes, I’ve felt like that”, or, most important, “Yes, I believe this program can work for me, too”.
Sixteen years have elapsed since 1939 (the original foreword) our first printing of this book and the presentation in 1955 of our second edition. In that brief space, Alcoholics Anonymous has mushroomed into nearly 6,000 groups whose membership is far above 150,000 recovered alcoholics.
Our book is meant to be suggestive only. We realize we know only a little. God will constantly disclose more to you and to us. Ask him in your morning meditation what you can do each day for the man/women who is still sick. The answers will come, if your own house is in order.
But obviously you cannot transmit something you haven’t got. See to it that your relationship with him is right, and great events will come to pass for you, and countless others. This is the great fact for us.
Abandon yourself to God as you under-stand God, admit your faults to him, and to your fellows. Clear away the wreckage of your past. Give freely of what you find and join us. We shall be with you in the fellowship of the spirit, and you will surely meet some of us as you trudge the road of Happy Destiny. May God bless you, and keep you-until then.
I would like to add that this book, the fellowship of A.A., and my “Higher Power”, has saved my life from destruction…..
The first 164 pages are the heart of recovery, while the rest of the book is of stories that have really happened to other members. I know this might be a long review, but believe me the program has saved millions from institutions, prisons and death. Alcoholism is a disease, and it has no prejudice at all, it doesn’t matter what color you are, what sex you are, or what title, or position you hold. Doctors, Lawyers, Teachers and people from all walks of life. It has torn threw families, and destroyed relationships over and over again. The only way is of complete surrender to a Higher Power, and the fellowship of recovery…..
Rating: 5 / 5