A fascinating account of the discovery and program of Alcoholics Anonymous, Not God contains anecdotes and excerpts from the diaries, correspondence, and occasional memoirs of AA's early figures.

The most complete history of A.A. ever written, this book is a fast-moving and authoritative account of the discovery and development of the program and fellowship that we know today as Alcoholics Anonymous.

Learn how to embrace your faults and vulnerabilities to experience true spiritual growth with this hopeful and motivational guide.

Inspiring . . . offering comfort . . . to those who want to stop striving for perfection and start living.--Publishers Weekly

I am not perfect is a simple statement of profound truth, the first step toward understanding the human condition--for to deny your essential imperfection is to deny your own humanity. By seeking to understand our limitations and accept the inevitably of failure and pain, we being to ease the hurt and move toward a greater sense of serenity and self-awareness. This illuminating book brings together the wisdom and stories of many traditions and faiths, from Hebrew prophets to Buddhist sages and Christian teachers, and from ancient Greeks to the modern insights of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Through thoughtful commentary and more than one hundred vividly told tales, The Spirituality of Imperfection enables us to accept the inevitability of pain and failure so that we can ease the hurt and move toward serenity and wholeness. It speaks to anyone who yearns to find meaning--and even joy--within suffering.

Shame & Guilt explores the differences between these two painful but inevitable experiences. Both guilt and shame involve feeling bad-feeling bad about one's actions (or omissions) in the case of guilt; feeling bad about one's self in shame. The deep meaning of the word bad is unable to fit unable to fit into some external context in the case of guilt, unable to fit into one's own being in the case of shame.

Human experience offers two different ways of discovering that one does not fit, of feeling bad. Each has to do with the boundaries of the human condition. But there are two kinds of boundaries, and it is important to recognize their difference, the difference between rules and goals. For though the human condition is bounded, recognizing that reality can be either a choking, tightening experience or it can lead to the discovery of a new freedom.

True, shame's negative side points up failure and falling short, but shame also entails something positive: insight into the reality of the human condition. The experience of shame lays bare the essential paradox that inheres in being human: to be human is to be caught in a contradictory tension between the pull to the unlimited, the more-than-human, and the drag of the merely limited, the less-than-human.

Shame's healing is to be found in the discovery of how that paradox can be lived creatively in ways that find other human beings to be not the problem in shame, but its solution.

A great master once said, The shortest distance between a human being and truth is a story. In Experiencing Spirituality, Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham take readers on a journey through storytelling as a means of self-discovery. Recounting and interpreting great wisdom stories from all ages and all cultures, as well as telling many of their own, the authors shed light on such experiences as awe, wonder, humor, confusion, and forgiveness.

In story after story, seekers look to those whose lives reveal a special quality--sometimes called spirituality--and ask the masters what they must do to attain that same quality. The answer is simple: Come, follow me, and see how I live. Experiencing Spirituality teaches through the example of human experience.

Ernest Kurtz has been the outstanding thinker of the A.A. tradition's second generation, the one who played a constant leadership role in pushing the movement towards the highest professional standards of history writing and supplied some of its most influential interpretive concepts. His ideas are vitally important for anyone who wishes to understand A.A. history during the period following Bill Wilson's death in 1971.

As a Ph.D. student at Harvard University in the 1970's, he was the first researcher to be granted full access to the archives of Alcoholics Anonymous. The book that resulted, Not-God: A History of Alcoholics Anonymous (1979), is still the classic work on early A.A. history. His book on the spiritual life-Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Modern Wisdom from Classic Stories (1992)-is equally well known, and has also been an enduring best seller through the years since it appeared. His work on Shame & Guilt (orig. pub. 1981, rev. ed. 2007) has given a whole new depth to the discussion of those two vital recovery issues.

This present book, containing twelve key articles written by Kurtz between 1982 and 1996, gives us a fourth volume from his hand, displaying the impressive range and breadth of his thought on alcoholism, addiction, and spirituality.

Here under one cover is Kurtz at his best: historian, gadfly, teacher, interpreter, and master storyteller . This is must reading for any student of Alcoholics Anonymous and the evolution of spirituality in America.
-William L. White, author of Slaying the Dragon: The History of Addiction Treatment and Recovery in America