It is hard to find Alcoholic Anonymous literature that has the same flavor as your favorite meeting... until now. This book was written in the same spirit that claims - "We are not a glum lot." This book has been received with such favor that I have now written a second book to add to it, another 101 cliches, so people now have more cliches and commentary to ponder and enjoy. In the Big Book, an alcoholic' states, "...the most compelling part of A.A., the part that made me want to try this sober thing, was the laughter, the pure joy of the laughter that I heard only from sober alcoholics." This book was written first, with the hope to spread this laughter to the newcomer that has lost all hope. Secondly, it serves to enlighten and dispel rumors about AA, to inform people who are simply curious about the teachings of A.A. It tells what it is really like from someone who has taken the journey and recovered. It is filled with witty heartfelt clichés that are so true, so sharp, they make the old-timers smile and the newcomers cringe. The clichés are used to teach newcomers the greater truths about the cure for alcoholism. Each cliché is a parable, an allegorical truth that is then explained using plainly stated information from knowledgable sponsors and the Big Book with humorous commentary from a recovered alcoholic. This book is not fluff, nor is it for the faint hearted. The world of alcohol and drug abuse is not pretty, nor one easily explained or understood. This book is gritty, informative, and at the same time inspirational and full of joy and hope, but most of all it was written with the newcomer in mind, so it does a balancing act just for them. It is meant to be simple, when I was first getting sober I had the attention span of a gnat. It is honest and funny and gives a glimpse of just how ugly addiction gets and how attractive real recovery can be. After reading about us, our cliches and our solution to a condition described as cunning, baffling and powerful, it is my hope at least some will say, "Yes, I am one of them, too; I, too, must have this thing." NOTE: the font size in this book is very close to LARGE PRINT

A 75th anniversary e-book version of the most important and practical self-help book ever written, Alcoholics Anonymous. Here is a special deluxe edition of a book that has changed millions of lives and launched the modern recovery movement: Alcoholics Anonymous. This edition not only reproduces the original 1939 text of Alcoholics Anonymous, but as a special bonus features the complete 1941 Saturday Evening Post article “Alcoholics Anonymous” by journalist Jack Alexander, which, at the time, did as much as the book itself to introduce millions of seekers to AA’s program. Alcoholics Anonymous has touched and transformed myriad lives, and finally appears in a volume that honors its posterity and impact.

The stories of the first heroic black men and women who joined Alcoholics Anonymous, told wherever possible in their own words, recorded freely and frankly. The story begins with St. Louis (January 24, 1945); followed by Chicago (March 20, 1945), along with the factory and foundry towns which spread eastwards as suburbs. Later that same year (April 1945) came the story of Dr. James C. Scott, Jr., M.D., the black physician who founded the first black A.A. group in the nation¿s capital, and was the first black A.A. member to get his story in the Big Book. The book concludes with the story of Joe McQuany (March 10, 1962) of the Joe and Charlie tapes, the most famous black figure in A.A. History. The lives of thousands and thousands of alcoholics around the world were saved by listening to recordings of his careful page-by-page explanation of the message of the Big Book. The powerful spiritual messages of all these brave men and women struck the hearts of everyone who heard them speak.

Gregory Bateson was a philosopher, anthropologist, photographer, naturalist, and poet, as well as the husband and collaborator of Margaret Mead. This classic anthology of his major work includes a new Foreword by his daughter, Mary Katherine Bateson. 5 line drawings.

Genre studies and genre approaches to literacy instruction continue to develop in many regions and from a widening variety of approaches. Genre has provided a key to understanding the varying literacy cultures of regions, disciplines, professions, and educational settings. GENRE IN A CHANGING WORLD provides a wide-ranging sampler of the remarkable variety of current work. The twenty-four chapters in this volume, reflecting the work of scholars in Europe, Australasia, and North and South America, were selected from the over 400 presentations at SIGET IV (the Fourth International Symposium on Genre Studies) held on the campus of UNISUL in Tubarão, Santa Catarina, Brazil in August 2007—the largest gathering on genre to that date. The chapters also represent a wide variety of approaches, including rhetoric, Systemic Functional Linguistics, media and critical cultural studies, sociology, phenomenology, enunciation theory, the Geneva school of educational sequences, cognitive psychology, relevance theory, sociocultural psychology, activity theory, Gestalt psychology, and schema theory. Sections are devoted to theoretical issues, studies of genres in the professions, studies of genre and media, teaching and learning genre, and writing across the curriculum. The broad selection of material in this volume displays the full range of contemporary genre studies and sets the ground for a next generation of work.

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Empathy Exams comes this transformative work showing that sometimes the recovery is more gripping than the addiction. With its deeply personal and seamless blend of memoir, cultural history, literary criticism, and reportage, The Recovering turns our understanding of the traditional addiction narrative on its head, demonstrating that the story of recovery can be every bit as electrifying as the train wreck itself. Leslie Jamison deftly excavates the stories we tell about addiction -- both her own and others' -- and examines what we want these stories to do and what happens when they fail us. All the while, she offers a fascinating look at the larger history of the recovery movement, and at the complicated bearing that race and class have on our understanding of who is criminal and who is ill. At the heart of the book is Jamison's ongoing conversation with literary and artistic geniuses whose lives and works were shaped by alcoholism and substance dependence, including John Berryman, Jean Rhys, Billie Holiday, Raymond Carver, Denis Johnson, and David Foster Wallace, as well as brilliant lesser-known figures such as George Cain, lost to obscurity but newly illuminated here. Through its unvarnished relation of Jamison's own ordeals, The Recovering also becomes a book about a different kind of dependency: the way our desires can make us all, as she puts it, "broken spigots of need." It's about the particular loneliness of the human experience-the craving for love that both devours us and shapes who we are. For her striking language and piercing observations, Jamison has been compared to such iconic writers as Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, yet her utterly singular voice also offers something new. With enormous empathy and wisdom, Jamison has given us nothing less than the story of addiction and recovery in America writ large, a definitive and revelatory account that will resonate for years to come.

Language of the Heart contains all of AA cofounder Bill W.'s Grapevine, including a vivid description of how he came to organize the Steps.