My Name Is Bill: Bill Wilson--His Life and the Creation of Alcoholics Anonymous
Author: Susan Cheever
In this definitive and groundbreaking biography, acclaimed author Susan Cheever offers a remarkably human portrait of a man whose life and work both influenced and saved the lives of millions of people. Drawing from personal letters, diaries, AA archives, interviews -- and Cheever's own experiences with alcoholism -- My Name Is Bill is the first fully documented, deeply felt account of Bill Wilson and Alcoholics Anonymous.
The New York Times
By some uncanny chance, the title character of a significant semiautobiographical story written in 1839 by Edgar Allan Poe, who also happened to have been an alcoholic, gave himself the name William Wilson. In My Name Is Bill, truth is sometimes stranger than fiction, though not much stranger than the tale of Poe's narrator, who becomes mad to the point of murder. Cheever's attractive protagonist harmed himself in many ways, but ultimately helped countless thousands. — Michael Kammen
Publishers Weekly
The first half of Wilson's life was a perpetual battle with alcohol; the second, a continual struggle to secure both his day-to-day sobriety and the organization that became Alcoholics Anonymous. Cheever's portrayal of Wilson's story never resorts to hagiography and doesn't dodge the controversies that other biographers have exploited, such as Wilson's womanizing and LSD use. The author of Note Found in a Bottle places greater emphasis on Wilson's rural Vermont childhood; his father's early desertion; his mother's stern, Calvinist nature; and the influence of his few male friends and authority figures. As a boy and adolescent, Wilson bounced among various activities and social groups, seldom sticking with one for long. He tended to seize upon short-term promises of happiness and security, whether a questionable job prospect or, with disastrous consequences, his first alcoholic drink. He grabbed impulsively at the first marriage opportunity, with Lois Burnham, four years his senior, and his drinking severely tested their marriage. In 1935, Wilson's contact with the Oxford Group and its Christian reform philosophy, and with Robert Smith, an Ohio doctor and alcoholic, laid a fragile foundation for the program and fellowship they would build into the worldwide organization for recovering alcoholics. Until his death in 1971, Wilson worked to strengthen the evolution of AA and never entirely abandoned his search for a better cure. Although the compression of so much material disserves Cheever's intentions, the resulting lumpiness is oddly consistent with Wilson's life and character. Agent, Kim Witherspoon. (Feb.) Forecast: The book has a built-in audience (AA claims to have two million members), and could benefit from the publication of an AA book specifically designed for women, The Little Red Book for Women, coming from Hazelden in February. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
Not a perfect life but ultimately a success; from a best-selling author. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
An earnest but flawed biography of the man Aldous Huxley described as "the greatest social architect of the twentieth century." A vast Alcoholics Anonymous archive, including hundreds of letters, helps novelist and memoirist Cheever (As Good As I Could Be, 2001, etc.) plumb the lifelong drive, intelligence, and self-doubt of AA cofounder Bill Wilson (1895-1971). Growing up in rural Vermont, Wilson witnessed principles of service and egalitarianism in action that he later embodied in AA's famous "Twelve Traditions." But he also felt unmoored when his parents divorced and his mother left him in the care of her father as she pursued a medical degree. Marriage to an educated older socialite fed his insecurity, eased only when he took his first drink while serving in WWI. Over the next 18 years, his growing addiction resulted in countless jobs lost or never pursued. Cheever is at her best in detailing the creation of AA, in 1935, by Dr. Bob Smith and Wilson, who recognized that alcoholism was a disease that could only be countered by a "Power greater than ourselves." The synthesis of ideas drawn from medicine, psychology, and moral reformers such as the Oxford Group and the Washington Temperance Movement provided a flexibility that enabled AA to grow to 30,000 members by 1946. Cheever acknowledges that Wilson was "not the stuff of saints," particularly after turning over AA to elected representatives in 1956. (He used his newfound freedom to experiment with LSD, Oujia boards, and extramarital relationships.) Her own experiences as a recovering alcoholic (see Note Found in a Bottle, 1999) deepen the author's insight into AA's philosophy and Wilson's struggles, and she writes lyrically about theenvironments in which her subject sometimes took refuge from his fame. But Cheever settles too often for cliches ("We are the most puritanical country on earth, and the most profligate"), and although she tells readers about Wilson's charisma, she does not make us feel it. Takes the measure of Wilson's achievement, but not his mesmeric personality. (b&w illustrations, not seen) Agent: Kim Witherspoon
Table of Contents:
Part One: A Rural Childhood1. The Wilson House
2. East Dorset
3. The Wilson Family and the Griffith Family
4. Dorset Pond
5. The Griffith House
6. The State of Vermont
7. Mark Whalon
8. Mount Aeolus
9. Burr and Burton
10. Bertha Bamford
11. Lois Burnham
12. New York City
13. New Bedford and the First Drink
Part Two: Drinking
14. France
15. The Edison Test
16. Brooklyn
17. Motorcycle Hobos
18. Manchester Airport
19. Montreal
20. Towns Hospital
Part Three: Alcoholics Anonymous
21. The Oxford Group
22. Akron, Ohio
23. 182 Clinton Street
24. Not Maximum
25. John D. Rockefeller, Jr.
26. Stepping Stones
27. 334 1/2 West 24th Street
28. Trabuco College
29. Depression
30. Our Common Welfare Should Come First
31. Dr. Robert Holbrook Smith
Part Four: Life After A.A.
32. The Spook Room
33. St. Louis, Missouri
34. Marty Mann
35. 526 Bedford Road
36. The Family Afterward
37. Carl Jung
38. Miami
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Chronology
Appendix: The Twelve Steps and The Twelve Traditions
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Look this: A Pilates Primer or More Now Again
The Sociopath Next Door
Author: Martha Stout
Who is the devil you know?
Is it your lying, cheating ex-husband?
Your sadistic high school gym teacher?
Your boss who loves to humiliate people in meetings?
The colleague who stole your idea and passed it off as her own?
In the pages of The Sociopath Next Door, you will realize that your ex was not just misunderstood. He’s a sociopath. And your boss, teacher, and colleague? They may be sociopaths too.
We are accustomed to think of sociopaths as violent criminals, but in The Sociopath Next Door, Harvard psychologist Martha Stout reveals that a shocking 4 percent of ordinary people—one in twenty-five—has an often undetected mental disorder, the chief symptom of which is that that person possesses no conscience. He or she has no ability whatsoever to feel shame, guilt, or remorse. One in twenty-five everyday Americans, therefore, is secretly a sociopath. They could be your colleague, your neighbor, even family. And they can do literally anything at all and feel absolutely no guilt.
How do we recognize the remorseless? One of their chief characteristics is a kind of glow or charisma that makes sociopaths more charming or interesting than the other people around them. They’re more spontaneous, more intense, more complex, or even sexier than everyone else, making them tricky to identify and leaving us easily seduced. Fundamentally, sociopaths are different because they cannot love. Sociopaths learn early on to show sham emotion, but underneath they are indifferent to others’ suffering. They live to dominate and thrill to win.
The fact is, we all almost certainly know at least one ormore sociopaths already. Part of the urgency in reading The Sociopath Next Door is the moment when we suddenly recognize that someone we know—someone we worked for, or were involved with, or voted for—is a sociopath. But what do we do with that knowledge? To arm us against the sociopath, Dr. Stout teaches us to question authority, suspect flattery, and beware the pity play. Above all, she writes, when a sociopath is beckoning, do not join the game.
It is the ruthless versus the rest of us, and The Sociopath Next Door will show you how to recognize and defeat the devil you know.
Newsweek
"One in 25 Americans is a sociopath-- no conscience, no guilt. It could be your mean boss or your crazy ex. [The Sociopath Next Door] is an easy-to-follow guide for spotting them."
The Washington Post - Martha Scout
In summary, I recommend this book, especially to those who think they may be vulnerable to sociopaths. It contains good stories, useful advice and clinical and scientific nuggets
Publishers Weekly
Harvard Medical School psychiatrist Stout says that as many as 4% of the population are conscienceless sociopaths who have no empathy or affectionate feelings for humans or animals. As Stout (The Myth of Sanity) explains, a sociopath is defined as someone who displays at least three of seven distinguishing characteristics, such as deceitfulness, impulsivity and a lack of remorse. Such people often have a superficial charm, which they exercise ruthlessly in order to get what they want. Stout argues that the development of sociopathy is due half to genetics and half to nongenetic influences that have not been clearly identified. The author offers three examples of such people, including Skip, the handsome, brilliant, superrich boy who enjoyed stabbing bullfrogs near his family's summer home, and Doreen, who lied about her credentials to get work at a psychiatric institute, manipulated her colleagues and, most cruelly, a patient. Dramatic as these tales are, they are composites, and while Stout is a good writer and her exploration of sociopaths can be arresting, this book occasionally appeals to readers' paranoia, as the book's title and its guidelines for dealing with sociopaths indicate. (Feb. 8) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
Stout (clinical psychiatry, Harvard Medical Sch.; The Myth of Sanity: Divided Consciousness and the Promise of Awareness) offers a novel perspective on sociopaths, i.e., people who have no conscience. Not only does she provide case studies and references to standard literature like Hervey Cleckley's The Mask of Sanity, but she also fashions the book in self-help mode. Her decision to do this stems from an alarming American Psychiatric Association statistic contending that four percent of the U.S. population-or one person in 25-is sociopathic. That makes it likely that everyone has encountered at least one sociopath. Accordingly, Stout provides self-defense measures in the form of "Thirteen Rules for Dealing with Sociopaths in Everyday Life"; moreover, she supplies provocative discussion about the role of conscience in the "normal" world. Highly recommended for all public libraries and for university libraries with large psychology collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 10/1/04; see also the Q&A with Stout at left.]-Lynne F. Maxwell, Villanova Univ. Sch. of Law Lib., PA Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
From the author of The Myth of Sanity (2001), a remarkable philosophical examination of the phenomenon of sociopathy and its everyday manifestations. Readers eager for a tabloid-ready survey of serial killers, however, will be disappointed. Instead, Stout (Psychiatry/Harvard Medical School) busies herself with exploring the workaday lives and motivations of those garden-variety sociopaths who are content with inflicting petty tyrannies and small miseries. As a practicing therapist, she writes, she has spent the past 25 years aiding the survivors of psychological trauma, most of them "controlled and psychologically shattered by individual human perpetrators, often sociopaths." Antisocial personality disorder, it turns out, occurs in around four percent of the population, so it's not too surprising that treating their victims has kept Stout quite busy for the past quarter-century. Employing vivid composite character sketches, the author introduces us to such unsavory characters as a psychiatric administrator who specializes in ingratiating herself with her office staff while making her patients feel crazier; a captain of industry who killed frogs as a child and is now convinced he can outsmart the SEC; and a lazy ladies' man who marries purely to gain access to his new wife's house and pool. These portraits make a striking impact, and readers with unpleasant neighbors or colleagues may find themselves paying close attention to Stout's sociopathic-behavior checklist and suggested coping strategies. In addition to introducing these everyday psychopaths, the author examines why the rest of us let them get away with murder. She extensively considers the presence or absence of conscience, aswell as our discomfort with questioning those seen as being in power. Stout also ponders our willingness to quash our inner voice when voting for leaders who espouse violence and war as a solution to global problems-pointed stuff in a post-9/11 political climate. Deeply thought-provoking and unexpectedly lyrical. Agent: Susan Lee Cohen
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