Alcoholics Anonymous: Cult or Cure?

Rating:
Summary: A Book to convince the unconverted
Review: Anyone who has been to AA meetings and witnessed the prevalence of people falling to their kness in prayer to their Higher Power, mentions of "GOD" and Our Lords Prayer knows that AA is a religion based on spirituality - just like Christianity.
Anyone who has also been to AA meetings and witnessed the sputtering and stuttering of the average meeting attendee reading through the simpleton's English of the Steps and Traditions knows that AA is not exactly a hotbed of intellectualism.
This book is really for the curious, but none the worse for that. Recommended if you want to understand AA's false promises.

Rating:
Summary: A doctor's opinion
Review: As an addiction medicine physician and one who has a sincere desire not to drink, I often go to AA meetings. The author is WRONG from the outset when he describes a "random" meeting. There is no such thing as a "random" meeting. Any meeting directory booklet will tell you if the meeting is smoking or non-smoking, open or closed, discussion or speaker, female only or "stag", gay or straight, big book or "12 and 12," etc. Meetings are designed for all demographics. It clearly is not a cult. There are no monetary demands and, really, no demands @ all. You don't have to say, do, or belive in anything if you don't want to. I personally have never seen anyone derided for any reason or met with anything but courtesy. Frankly, people in AA really don't care if someone comes to a meeting or not- the help's there if you WANT it. People are @ meetings for their own sobriety, not yours. And the emphasis on religion in this book is absurd. I have never seen or heard anyone @ a meeting ask or care what religion, if any, you believe in- so you may say an "our father" prayer, SO WHAT!? The whole scary "higher power" thing is simply this: if you could get sober by yourself, you wouldn't be @ an AA in the first place. Most importantly, AA just flat out works. You can say it's just a bunch of bumper sticker slogans, say it's for blind sheep, even say (as the author does)it has bad coffee. But you can't say it doesn't work if you want it to. This has been data proven (although it is true that court mandated AA has little utility). People that have a home group, sponsor, and actively work the steps have a remarkable clean rate. As a scientist and an objective thinker, I like reading things that challenge my beliefs, but this author is too biased to offer me much.

Rating:
Summary: Exhaustive research, legitimate opinions
Review: I've been an enthusiastic member of AA for over 15 years, enjoying being sober and getting on with life.

For sure, the promises from AA include a few more than the ones on page 83 of the Big Book. "Stop going to meetings and you'll end up drunk." "No true alcoholic can practise controlled drinking." "AA really works for most people." For me, Bufe's book and the evidence he cites in a scholarly way contradict these "known truths" of AA, and a good few more. I feel as though I've been sappily accepting everything AA tells me without bothering to check - not that AA encourages checking - and that Bufe has done a real job of work on digging out facts which cast light on how AA works (or not).

I agree with his proposition that coerced attendance at AA is wrong, though it doesn't seem to be as widely practiced this side of the Atlantic. To learn that coerced attendance is counterproductive is indeed interesting - particularly since I am working in Probation Liaison for the local intergroup. Oops. Maybe that'll be "was working" shortly, when I've done a bit of checking.

Bufe is a bit naive about the steps and how they are worked in practice, I believe, but nonetheless he has some real points about the mind set required to work them per Big Book.

I think this is an excellent book, even if I find it deeply disturbing. I went to one of my regular meetings this morning, and found myself hearing echoes of Bufe all the time!

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Rating:
Summary: A good history of AA
Review: In "Alcoholics Anonymous, Cult or Cure," Bufe gives us an intelligible analysis of the largest recovery group in the United States and perhaps the world.

He gives the reader an in depth history of the foundations of Alcholics Anonymous - which are clearly religious in nature. He also does an excellent job of analysing the 12 step process and the 12 traditions of AA. His bibliography of sources is commendable and lend credibility to his monograph.

I would highly recommend this book to those medical professionals who are considering sending patients to AA for "voluntary" treatment. The courts should also take a look at this book - AA simply doesn't work for those who do not "want it." Court cases, 99% of them, have no desire to change their drinking patterns and AA, as a result, is a complete waste of time for these individuals.

This book is not so much of an overt attack on AA, as is Jack Trimpey's Rational Recovery, but nevertheless it does expose the dark underbelly of AA's "diseasing of America" concept proferred by Dr. Stanton Peele.

If you are in doubt about AA - this is a good book for you. However, if the Alcoholics Anonymous program is working for you - then you should avoid this text.

Rating:
Summary: A good history of AA
Review: In "Alcoholics Anonymous, Cult or Cure," Bufe gives us an intelligible analysis of the largest recovery group in the United States and perhaps the world.

He gives the reader an in depth history of the foundations of Alcholics Anonymous - which are clearly religious in nature. He also does an excellent job of analysing the 12 step process and the 12 traditions of AA. His bibliography of sources is commendable and lend credibility to his monograph.

I would highly recommend this book to those medical professionals who are considering sending patients to AA for "voluntary" treatment. The courts should also take a look at this book - AA simply doesn't work for those who do not "want it." Court cases, 99% of them, have no desire to change their drinking patterns and AA, as a result, is a complete waste of time for these individuals.

This book is not so much of an overt attack on AA, as is Jack Trimpey's Rational Recovery, but nevertheless it does expose the dark underbelly of AA's "diseasing of America" concept proferred by Dr. Stanton Peele.

If you are in doubt about AA - this is a good book for you. However, if the Alcoholics Anonymous program is working for you - then you should avoid this text.

Rating:
Summary: A Book to convince the unconverted
Review: Isaac Asimov (one who has a much greater intellectual capacity than the author... and myself) said that the greatest product to come out of America in the 20th century were the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Rating:
Summary: Revealing the true menace...
Review: Those who would dismiss this book as simply a diatribe against AA either have not read it thoroughly, or are so entrenched in 12-step dogma as to be impervious to evidence. This book is an analysis, not an indictment, of the tenets of AA and the myriad 12-step groups which have followed it's precepts.

Should virtually anything, watching "teletubbies," for instance, free a single person from the misery which is caused by pathologically heavy drinking, I would not hesitate to recommend it as a possibility to a suffering soul. The facts , however, as Mr. Bufe illustrates so well in this book, show that participation in this program not only is unlikely to result in abstinence, but may well discourage those who are made uncomfortable or who are offended by the unmistakably religious foundation of this paradigm from seeking alternative means of treatment. (For those who would take exception to this assertion, I would direct them to the first paragraph of the fifth chapter of the Big Book, ubiquitous at the beginning of the majority of AA meetings, where the unequivocal statement is made that those who do or will not recover as a result of attendance are "constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves." If you do not, for any reason, agree with AA, you are engaging in self-deception.)

The critical chapter of this book (and the source of the heading of this review) is the one in which Mr. Bufe examines the effect which the various 12-step programs have had on our society in it's influence over our courts, and in the dilution of the popular concept of addiction.

For those interested in the subject, I would highly recommend "The Diseasing of America," by Stanton Peele,and "Heavy Drinking: the Myth of Alcoholism as a Disease," by Herbert Fingarette,both, of course, available at Amazon.com.