Not-God by Ernest Kurtz

About the Book
    Not-God is a fascinating, fast-moving, and authoritative account of the discovery and development of the program and fellowship that we know today as Alcoholics Anonymous.
    Easily readable, Not-God contains more anecdotes and excerpts from the diaries, correspondence, and occasional memoirs of A.A.’s early figures than are heard in a hundred A.A. meetings. Kurtz traces the interesting debts that A.A. owes to such persons and groups as the psychiatrist Carl Jung, American philosopher William James, Akron social matron Henrietta Seiberling, and John D. Rockefeller, Jr., as well as the Oxford Group of Frank Buchman, a few Irish-American Catholic priests, and fundamentalist religion.
    Beginning with the well-known visit between the sober Ebby T. and the drunken Bill Wilson, Kurtz documents Wilson’s spiritual awakening (or “hot flash” as the first fifty A.A.s called it), his desire to tell other alcoholics what he had discovered, and his ever-growing conviction that to stay sober he must work with other alcoholics.
    The story relates the importance of the Oxford Group to the development of A.A., the painful writing of the Big Book, even the problems caused over the years by Wilson’s unofficial status as “Head of A.A.,” and the fight involving the A.A. Board of Trustees. All is told in the context of two important points: Wilson and the first recovered alcoholics were keenly aware of their own limitation as alcoholics, and—more important—they discovered a health and wholeness, a maturity, as sober individuals within the fellowship of A.A.
    Ernest Kurtz was given full and complete access to the archives of the General Service Office of Alcoholics Anonymous in New York. His unhindered research, coupled with extensive interviews of surviving early members and friends of A.A., has resulted in an account with documented accuracy.
    Not-God clearly details the slow but unswerving development of a program of recovery for alcoholics, and it carries the message that Alcoholics Anonymous as a program and fellowship has to give to the United States of America in the middle third of the twentieth century.
    About the Author
    Ernest Kurtz received his Ph.D. in the History of American Civilization from Harvard University in 1978 and came to the study of history after professional experience in both religion and psychology.
    He is on the faculty of the Rutgers University Summer School of Alcohol Studies, and holds the title of Adjunct Research Scientist at the Center for Self-Help Research and Knowledge Dissemination at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

“First of all we had to quit playing God.”
    Alcoholics Anonymous, p. 62

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