Getting Better: Inside Alcoholics Anonymous.

• Author: Doar, Robert

What Alcoholics Anonymous can teach the rest of us. On The Wagon

Henrietta Seiberling, a divorced mother of two in Akron, Ohio, was at home with her children when the stranger called. The caller had gotten Henrietta's name from an Episcopal minister who said Henrietta might be able to help him with his problem. His problem? "I'm a rum hound from New York," said the stranger.

It was May 1935, and the stranger was Bill Wilson, a failed stockbroker from Brooklyn who had come to Akron on one more ill-fated business trip. A bigtalking and manipulative drunk, Wilson had spent years of his life drinking all day and every night. His hands shook so badly in the morning that he needed a glass of gin and a beer to eat breakfast. Never able to hold a job, Wilson lived off his wife, who worked in a department store.

For the two months preceding his trip to Akron, however, Wilson had remained sober. Now, alone in a small, unfamiliar city, he was dying for a drink--and looking for someone to talk him out of it.

Like Wilson, Seiberling was a member of the Oxford group, a nondenominational religious organization that gave particular attention to drunks. At Oxford group meetings she had met and come to know a tall, taciturn, drunk named Dr. Bob Smith. (Smith was a physician who specialized in rectal surgery, and the joke around Akron was that when you went to Smith you really bet your ass.) For more than a year Seiberling had been trying to convince Smith to stay sober. Now with the call from the out-of-towner, she saw her chance. "This was like manna from heaven," she thought at the time.

And perhaps it was. The following day, Seiberling had Wilson and Smith to dinner at her home. When she put the two men alone in the upstairs library for some after-dinner conversation, Alcoholics Anonymous was born.

Seiberling's simple act of neighborliness kicked off something big. That first night in 1935 Bill Wilson and Bob Smith formed a fellowship of two that has since grown to almost two million. (Millions more have benefited from A.A. but are not counted by A.A. because they no longer attend its meetings regularly.) Through their efforts (Smith concentrated his in Akron, Wilson went national) and through the publication of Wilson's book, Alcoholics Anonymous, A.A. has become a worldwide organization, with 76 thousand groups in 119 countries. More than 90 thousand A.A. meetings are held every week in the United States.

Saving lives is what A.A. does. The National Council on Alcoholism estimates that more than 97 thousand people suffer alcohol-related deaths every year. Without A.A. that number would be much higher. What's more, alcoholism is emotionally contagious. It scars more than just one person. It damages families, friendships, the work place. It poisons relations between people. Every time a person takes his first steps toward recovery through A.A., he is also making himself a better parent, sibling, and friend.

The history, teachings, and structure of Alcoholics Anonymous is the subject of Nan Robertson's new book.(*) A longtime reporter for The New York Times, whose story about her battle with toxic shock syndrome won her a Pulitzer Prize in 1985, Robertson is a member of A.A. Though the last chapter tells the tale of Robertson's own sickness (when she was the Times's correspondent in Paris her lunchtime intake was two double scotches and a carafe of wine), Getting Better is much more than a personal narrative. And it is more than a straight recounting of the history of A.A.

Instead, Getting Better is...