Most remarkable about this book is the fact that it reveals how much the author, despite the title of the book, really got out of AA—how much AA helped her, esp. during her early days of sobriety. In fact, in the conclusion, the author recants a lot of what she says during the book, going on to say AA’s v. useful and that moderate drinking won’t work for most.

Her basic prob with AA seems to be that once she came out of the fog of addiction, she didn’t find that AA solved all her life’s problems - surprise surprise - and thus the book’s about her deciding to diss AA and embrace Deepak Choprah.

Then the rest of the book’s basically empty vague platitudes about fear and love from a woman who really doesn’t seem qualified to be making overarching statements about such broad emotions.

The author does point out some of the limitations of AA that I agree with, particularly AA’s religio-patriarchal bent that sounds a lot like traditional xtian doctrine (i.e. you’re innately sinful and will go to hell unless you follow jesus = you’re innately a drunk and will go crazy or die unless you follow AA’s doctrine and never stop going to meetings). Of course other people’ve already pointed that out, and in fact the most insightful part of this book is the foreword by Charlotte Kasl, who’s written a couple books on this topic.