The Recovery Bible

Alcoholism is a problem that ruins people of all social classes. In The Recovery Bible we have first person accounts of addiction and recovery, but they’re mostly from the days before World War II. This was an era when you didn’t have fancy rehab, and recovery meant cold turkey, not pills. You didn’t have Hollywood celebrities getting famous from their addictions, because the shame of alcohol and sleeping pills were an incentive to keep it all hidden. One of the radical things about Alcoholics Anonymous is that it required confession; you had to admit that your drinking had taken control of you, and that you were no longer in charge. But there’s one thing absent from a lot of these accounts; nobody changes their habits unless they really want to, and to really want to, you may have to hit rock bottom.

It’s an interesting book. Most of the accounts are by men, and that doesn’t surprise me, because up until the 1920’s, it was considered unacceptable for women to drink alcohol. Those of you that watch Sex And The City know that it perfectly common these days for both genders to have $30 cocktails every day of the week, and that was something you didn’t see at the time AA began. Come to think of it, the Sex And The City characters probably drink two or three pints of hard liquor in every episode. But in the Back Slider chapter of The Recovery Bible, it’s clear that the man’s alcoholism made things a hundred times worse for the women in the family. You didn’t have a whole lot of jobs for women in those days, and if the husband and father started drinking, the family would be ruined.

I have only one problem with this book, in that I believe it may give a slightly inaccurate representation of the events that lead to a person joining Alcoholics Anonymous. It’s unlikely that an addict will want help unless he loses his support network, or to put it in a gambler’s lingo, “his luck runs out.” The only way he’ll acknowledge that his luck has run out is when his wife locks him out, his family hang up on his, and his boss fires him. Out on the streets with nothing, he’ll soon realize that his ways don’t work. It’s for this reason that I think The Lost Weekend had the wrong ending. The alcoholic in that story would not have stopped drinking as long as his girlfriend was there, and his brother was paying his rent, and the bar gave him credit. I’ve heard addiction counselors tell me the same thing.