"Every policymaker in America needs to read your book exposing the myths of chemical addictionExcellent book." —Congressman Jim Ramstad (MN), member, Ways and Means Committee and Health Subcommittee
"Read it and be prepared to change your thinking on this important topic." —Michael Shermer, publisher,
Skeptic magazine; columnist,
Scientific American; author,
Why People Believe Weird Things"Every person on the planet should read this book. offers hope that help and healing is possible." —Cynthianna Appel, Fearless Reviews
Owner Reviews, Ratings, Comments and Criticism
Anyone who has a drinking problem or is associated with someone who has a drinking problems will benefit enormously from reading this book. Many people who deal with alcoholics live in a world fraught with uncertainty and illogic. This book attempts and succeeds in making sense out of the senseless. Thorburn does a masterly job of identifying the problem and explaining the chain of events which occurs in alcoholics' livers, central nervous systems and brains.
This book also does a great job of identifying the resulting behaviors and misbehaviors while explaining their underlying causes. To put it overly-simply: the alcoholic's behavior is the result of distortions in perception because he has turned his brain into a toxic waste dump. Once the alcoholic has gotten enough clean-time for the toxins to filter out of his system, many of the behavioral abnormalities disappear.
Thorburn also offers practical advice on how to deal with alcoholics. Basically, get tough, stand your ground and be prepared for the alcoholic to try to manipulate anything and everything to his own advantage. Once you have a basic grasp of the inner-workings of alcoholism, you will know that the most helpful thing you can do for them is to let them reap the consequences of their delusional behavior. Beyond that, you really are powerless to do anything else.
If for no other reason, this book is a priceless tool for spotting typically alcoholic behaviors. Many of the personality traits common to most alcoholics manifest themselves in surprising and subtle ways which most people would not suspect as being indicative of an addiction problem (e.g. - self-favoring memory recall). Recently I have avoided two potentially disastrous relationships (one business and one personal); subsequent events confirmed addiction problems which no one else suspected at the time.
I am an alcoholic in recovery and I have learned more from this book than anything else I have read (and that's a long list). The complex concepts are explained clearly and simply without compromising the subject matter.
