Discoveries

My Name Is Bill

Bill Wilson: His Life and the Creation of Alcoholics Anonymous

Susan Cheever

Simon & Schuster: 306 pp., $24

Reading Susan Cheever’s remarkable account of Bill Wilson’s early years in East Dorset, Vt., at the turn of the century, one is amazed that he didn’t start drinking earlier, say, in kindergarten. Reared mostly by his grandparents in a cold, overbearing, perfectionist environment, he became a charismatic, honest, deeply insecure man. He suffered many disappointments: His alcoholic father left; his mother left soon after to seek her fortune in Boston; his first girlfriend died after surgery. Add a backdrop of post-temperance New England, pre-Prohibition America, World War I on the horizon, the stock market boom followed by the Depression and you have the ingredients for the explosive cocktail that affected so many Americans in the first half of the century.

It wasn’t until the late 1930s that Wilson, drawing on his New England upbringing, his contact with the followers of Emanuel Swedenborg, his reading of the works of William and Henry James and his own experiences shaking alcoholism, wrote “Alcoholics Anonymous” and laid the groundwork for the organization that has changed so many lives. Stories of the first meetings in his Massachusetts home (almost everything they owned was stolen) are wildly entertaining and very moving. In 1941, there were 8,000 members. By 1946 there were 39,000. But Wilson’s private demons still haunted in the form of depression. There is quite a bit of cheerleading in the book, but Cheever embraces the contradictions in Wilson’s life and in the organization he founded.

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The Anatomy of Hope: How People Prevail in the Face of Illness

Jerome Groopman

Random House: 252 pp., $24.95

“With each increment in improvement,” writes Dr. Jerome Groopman, “the body sends more signals that inform the brain of a return to health. As with a climber gradually ascending from a deep and threatening crevasse, each upward step makes it easier to see the end and sustain hope.” Groopman, who holds the Dina and Raphael Chair of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, has written a clear, sweet description of his growth as a doctor specializing in blood diseases and oncology.

In his last year of medical school, Groopman helped treat a young Orthodox Jewish woman diagnosed with breast cancer who believed that the cancer was a punishment for her sins (which she confessed to the reluctant, overwhelmed medical student). Her lack of hope was the beginning of his true education. Moonlighting during a fellowship at UCLA, he watched a physician in a rural town deliver false hope to a woman with Stage D colon cancer. It was the voice of the woman’s daughter, furiously asking if Groopman thought they were “too ignorant” to understand the diagnosis that rang another bell in the young doctor’s practice.

Ten years later, watching a revered mentor at Harvard struggle with stomach cancer and prevail against grueling odds, he again witnessed the value of hope in healing. Then a back injury exposed Groopman to months of extreme pain, adding yet another facet to the jewel at the heart of this book. As the technology and range of medicines grew, so did his understanding of the subtleties and varieties of hope. Here is a man who has seen many deaths and many miracles and who writes about them with vigor and faith in the power of individuals to change their fates and in some power larger than all of us as well.

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Feng Shui Your Life

Jayme Barrett

Sterling: 272 pp., $24.95

Books like “Feng Shui Your Life” usually languish on coffee tables, picked at like so many hors d’oevres. But this one is more than just a pretty face. It’s a practical, inspiring roadmap to clearing clutter from your life, and the first on feng shui I’ve seen that isn’t just for people who can afford to throw out their broken things and buy new ones. It is, in other words, a helpful basis for true change.