Big Book Analysis...

There are some people in the world who have made it their life's work to deconstruct the "Big Book" of Alcoholics Anonymous. Most have done this in a healthy way as an attempt to help people understand the levels of meaning that the book has and the myriad of ways to view the content that has helped millions of men and women recover from active alcoholism. And, while there are some who have done this as a way to discredit the book's value, the overwhelming number of commentaries on the book are positive attempts to provide a road map through the logic that the first 100 members of AA used to present their method of recovery.

I have recently come to own one of these manuscripts that - although never published - is one of the finest examples of this process of fully explaining what the Big Book means and how AA was created. I'll use the name "Mr. Jones" as a reference for its author because I am unsure where this copy of the manuscript came from and do not want to compromise the source (the copyright on this copy may not have been honored in reproducing it and so long as it is not used for commercial profit I'm OK with owning it). Regardless, this is a wonderful, unedited version of how AA was created and the principles that undergird recovery through the 12 Steps.

Mr. Jones has a huge amount of inside information about the foundations of AA that must have come from years of painstaking research. He has a list of the "cast of characters" who were instrumental in creating AA - from Bill W. and Dr. Bob, through Drs. Carl Jung and Sam Shoemaker, to Philosopher William James and Ebby Thatcher (Bill's sponsor). Now, some of these names may not be familiar to the average reader, but they are all a part of what we know today as Alcoholics Anonymous having its roots in ideas about alcoholism that came from many other people before Bill W. and Dr. Bob. That's the way it is with many ideas that get to be a part of the mainstream culture - it builds upon what was already thought about by different people in different settings and comes together under one umbrella organization like AA.

There is a master timeline that shows the critical dates in AA development from the month that Ebby first carried the message of recovery to a still-drinking Bill W. in November, 1934, to the date of Dr. Bob's last drink on June 10, 1935 which is known as "Founder's Day" in AA. I did not realize that it only took four months from the time Bill W. first wrote out the 12 Steps on a yellow scratch pad in December 1938 at his home to the copies of the Big Book coming off the presses in April 1939. That's truly amazing.

Mr. Jones also has organized his commentary in a very helpful way. He chose to use the chapters of the Big Book itself as a way to organize his comments and interpretations of the chapter and paragraph meanings. So, one can find ideas about spirituality in "We Agnostics" and who the "alcoholic friend" who visited Bill was (Ebby Thatcher) in the forward to the Second Edition section.

But the best part of this manuscript is where Mr. Jones comments on the sections as ways to guide the reader through meaning that may have been intended by the 100 AA authors. There are just too many of these references in the 155-page manuscript to recount here. But, the reader should know that these commentaries obviously come from someone who knows the Big Book and AA very well from both intellectual and personal experience.

While I won't pretend to know everything that Mr. Jones knows about the Big Book and the founding of AA, I might be able to answer some of your questions about these matters thanks to having this manuscript. So, if you need answers to age-old questions that have been haunting you, drop me a line and I'll see what I can come up with.

Until then, all the best, Roger W.