Recovery Books

Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself

Melody Beattie

Amazon Price: $10.85 List Price: $15.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Hazelden Amazon Marketplace: 189 new & used starting at $2.00

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 158 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Glad I didn't buy it. . . 2 out of 5 stars.
0 of 1 people found this review helpful.

instead, I checked it out at my local library. It was
DEPRESSING (unnecessarily)! She said in 200 pages what could have been said in 50. Most of the ideas were repeated. If one is reading that book, they must have a pretty good idea they are co-dependent. Instead, she gives multiple check lists, vignettes, definitions. She never turns it around postively so you can benefit from the grueling experience (of reading her book). She also "talks down" to the reader, referring to herself frequently as a "professional." There are many professions in the world, many highly educated who are co-dependent.

Editorial Review:

Is someone else's problem your problem? If, like so many others, you've lost sight of your own life in the drama of tending to someone else's, you may be codependent--and you may find yourself in this book.

The healing touchstone of millions, this modern classic by one of America's best-loved and most inspirational authors holds the key to understanding codependency and to unlocking its stultifying hold on your life.

With instructive life stories, personal reflections, exercises, and self-tests, Codependent No More is a simple, straightforward, readable map of the perplexing world of codependency--charting the path to freedom and a lifetime of healing, hope, and happiness.

Melody Beattie is the author of Beyond Codependency, The Language of Letting Go, Stop Being Mean to Yourself, and Playing It by Heart.

Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction

David Sheff

Amazon Price: $13.97 List Price: $24.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Houghton Mifflin Co Amazon Marketplace: 117 new & used starting at $7.75

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Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Memoirs

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 104 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Beautiful Boy 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I have shared this book with my 21 yr old son who is in prison because of drug related crimes. I received a letter today saying that he now understands my side of his addiction. We have read both books (Beautiful Boy and Tweak)by father and son and have new insight and understanding for what we have BOTH been through. I hope to pass these books along to other family members and hope they gain some insight for what we have been through and can be more generous in their support for both of us. Thank you so much Sheff's for your bearing of soul. It has helped me and my son to grow closer.

Editorial Review:

Amazon Best of the Month, February 2008: From as early as grade school, the world seemed to be on Nic Sheff's string. Bright and athletic, he excelled in any setting and appeared destined for greatness. Yet as childhood exuberance faded into teenage angst, the precocious boy found himself going down a much different path. Seduced by the illicit world of drugs and alcohol, he quickly found himself caught in the clutches of addiction. Beautiful Boy is Nic's story, but from the perspective of his father, David. Achingly honest, it chronicles the betrayal, pain, and terrifying question marks that haunt the loved ones of an addict. Many respond to addiction with a painful oath of silence, but David Sheff opens up personal wounds to reinforce that it is a disease, and must be treated as such. Most importantly, his journey provides those in similar situations with a commodity that they can never lose: hope --Dave Callanan

The Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of His Life -- His Own

David Carr

Amazon Price: $15.60 List Price: $26.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Simon & Schuster Amazon Marketplace: 21 new & used starting at $14.95

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Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Professionals & Academics -> Journalists

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Amazon Best of the Month, August 2008: In his fabulously entertaining The Kid Stays in the Picture, legendary Hollywood producer Robert Evans wrote: "There are three sides to every story: yours, mine, and the truth." David Carr's riveting debut memoir, The Night of the Gun, takes this theory to the extreme, as the New York Times reporter embarks on a three-year fact-finding mission to revisit his harrowing past as a drug addict and discovers that the search for answers can reveal many versions of the truth. Carr acknowledges that you can't write a my-life-as-an-addict story without the recent memoir scandals of James Frey and others weighing you down, but he regains the reader's trust by relying on his reporting skills to conduct dozens of often uncomfortable interviews with old party buddies, cops, and ex-girlfriends and follow an endless paper trail of legal and medical records, mug shots, and rejection letters. The kaleidoscopic narrative follows Carr through failed relationships and botched jobs, in and out of rehab and all manner of unsavory places in between, with cameos from the likes of Tom Arnold, Jayson Blair, and Barbara Bush. Admittedly, it's hard to love David Carr--sometimes you barely like the guy. How can you feel sympathy for a man who was smoking crack with his pregnant girlfriend when her water broke? But plenty of dark humor rushes through the book, and knowing that this troubled man will make it--will survive addiction, fight cancer, raise his twin girls--makes you want to stick around for the full 400-page journey. --Brad Thomas Parsons

The Easy Way to Stop Smoking: Join the Millions Who Have Become Non-Smokers Using Allen Carr's Easyway Method

Allen Carr

Amazon Price: $10.17 List Price: $14.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Sterling Amazon Marketplace: 79 new & used starting at $8.46

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Subjects -> Health, Mind & Body -> Recovery -> Smoking
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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 429 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Easy way and Chantix 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

This was literally the most important book I've ever read. I'd tried the patch, wellbutrin, nicorette, hypnosis, etc. during my 30 years of 1 1/2 to 2 pack-a-day smoking and hadn't been able to quit. I finally reached the point at which I gave up as I believed I was just too weak to quit. I thought there was something wrong with me compared to the others who made it through withdrawal to quit. Then, I heard about this book while reading about a new drug: chantix. I ordered the book from amazon and made an appt. with my doc to get chantix. I began reading when I started the chantix. I finished the book in one week and found I'd completely lost my desire to smoke. I couldn't believe it, I had no withdrawal pangs! I was actually in a better mood...I'm not kidding. People around me couldn't believe it as I'd always been a huge b*tch when I'd quit before, but this time I was excited and happy. I took the chantix for two months, then discontinued. It's been 6 months now and I know nothing will ever make me smoke again. I realize one could say the chantix is what aided my quitting, but I firmly believe this book is what made all of the difference. It got my head in the right space. I highly recommend this book to any smoker. I strongly suggest you doubly arm yourself and get both the book and chantix. Using this method you can't fail.

Good luck!

Editorial Review:

A new edition of the revolutionary bestseller, with four million copies in print. Allen Carr’s innovative Easyway method—which he discovered after his own 100-cigarette-a-day habit nearly drove him to despair—has helped millions kick smoking without feeling anxious and deprived. That’s because he helps smokers discover the psychological reasons behind their dependency, explains in detail how to handle the withdrawal symptoms, shows them how to avoid situations when temptation might become too strong, and enables them to stay smoke-free. Carr discusses such issues as nicotine addiction; the social “brainwashing” that encourages smoking; the false belief that a cigarette relieves stress; the role boredom plays in sabotaging efforts to stop; and the main reasons for failure. With this proven program, smokers will be throwing away their packs for good.

The Heroin Diaries: A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rock Star

Nikki Sixx

Amazon Price: $21.45 List Price: $32.50 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Pocket Books Amazon Marketplace: 52 new & used starting at $19.89

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Subjects -> Entertainment -> Pop Culture -> Art
Subjects -> Entertainment -> Music -> General
Subjects -> Entertainment -> Music -> Musical Genres -> Rock

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 250 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In one of the most unique memoirs of addiction ever published, Mötley Crüe's Nikki Sixx shares mesmerizing diary entries from the year he spiraled out of control in a haze of heroin and cocaine, presented alongside riveting commentary from people who were there at the time, and from Nikki himself.

When Mötley Crüe was at the height of its fame, there wasn't any drug Nikki Sixx wouldn't do. He spent days -- sometimes alone, sometimes with other addicts, friends, and lovers -- in a coke and heroin-fueled daze. The highs were high, and Nikki's journal entries reveal some euphoria and joy. But the lows were lower, often ending with Nikki in his closet, surrounded by drug paraphernalia and wrapped in paranoid delusions.

Here, Nikki shares those diary entries -- some poetic, some scatterbrained, some bizarre -- and reflects on that time. Joining him are Tommy Lee, Vince Neil, Mick Mars, Slash, Rick Nielsen, Bob Rock, and a host of ex-managers, ex-lovers, and more.

Brutally honest, utterly riveting, and shockingly moving, The Heroin Diaries follows Nikki during the year he plunged to rock bottom -- and his courageous decision to pick himself up and start living again.

Hero of the Underground: A Memoir

Jason Peter, Tony O'Neill

Amazon Price: $16.47 List Price: $24.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: St. Martin's Press Amazon Marketplace: 25 new & used starting at $15.50

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

I wasn’t afraid of death.

How could I be? I lived under death’s shadow every day. When you swallow eighty Vicodin, twenty sleeping pills, drink a bottle of vodka, and still survive, a certain sense of invulnerability stays with you. When you continually use drugs with the kind of reckless determination that I did, the limit to how much heroin or crack you can ingest is not defined in dollar amounts, but in the amounts your body can withstand without experiencing a seizure or respiratory failure. Yet at the end of every binge, every night of lining up six, seven, eight crack pipes and hitting them one after the other bam! bam! bam! every night of smoking and snorting bag after bag of heroin . . . after all of that, when you still wake up to see the same dirty sky over you as the night before, you start to think that instead of dying, maybe your punishment is to live---to be stuck in this purgatory of self-abuse and misery for an eternity. Sometimes you start to think that death would come as a blessed relief.

Toward the end, I found myself contemplating death again. Only this time I wasn’t going to leave it to chance. I was going to buy a gun, load the thing, place the barrel in my mouth, and blow my fucking brains out.

I sat on my parents’ sofa as I pondered this. All I needed was a gun.

And then all--
of my problems--
would be solved.

The Language of Letting Go (Hazelden Meditation Series)

Melody Beattie

Amazon Price: $11.53 List Price: $16.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Hazelden Amazon Marketplace: 130 new & used starting at $4.71

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Subjects -> Health, Mind & Body -> Alternative Medicine -> Meditation
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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 68 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

New Age Snake Oil 1 out of 5 stars.
1 of 13 people found this review helpful.

Orange Papers verbatim:

The A.A. God:

The A.A. God is the generic brand that comes in a plain white box at the supermarket.

The A.A. God has a lot of will. He has a Will for everything and everybody, and everybody is supposed to do something to please God. Apparently, the A.A. God did not succeed in making the world the way that He wanted it to be, so both He and his followers have to be constantly changing things, trying to get it right.

The A.A. God is an authoritarian male figure Who closely resembles an Old-Testament patriarch, like Charlton Heston playing Moses.

The A.A. God is a dictator.

The A.A. God wants you to be a slave forever.

The A.A. God loves you the most when you are grovelling on your knees, confessing what a worthless sinner you are. Only then will the A.A. God do favors for you.

The A.A. God is highly illogical, if not outright insane. First, the A.A. God will stick you with the genes for alcoholism and make you a born alcoholic, then He will wish you weren't an alcoholic and an excessive drinker. Go figure.

The A.A. God has a grand plan for you: First, incurable alcoholism, and then, more incurable alcoholism.

The A.A. God is so harsh that He will condemn you to a horrible painful death by alcohol unless you properly perform your sycophant duties every day. The A.A. God routinely kills alcoholics who don't Work the Steps thoroughly.

When the A.A. God heals alcoholics, He only fixes them for one day at a time. For some unknown reason, God's magic wears off after 24 hours.

The A.A. God micromanages the world. He is constantly tweaking everything, pulling millions and billions of puppet strings to make things happen differently, to make things turn out exactly the way He wants, and to convenience some of his followers.

The A.A. God cheats at solitaire.

Editorial Review:

Melody Beattie integrates her own life experiences and fundamental recovery reflections in this unique daily meditation book written especially for those of us who struggle with the issue of codependency.

Problems are made to be solved, Melody reminds us, and the best thing we can do is take responsibility for our own pain and self-care. In this daily inspirational book, Melody provides us with a thought to guide us through the day and she encourages us to remember that each day is an opportunity for growth and renewal.

A Million Little Pieces

James Frey

Amazon Price: $10.85 List Price: $15.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Anchor Amazon Marketplace: 1968 new & used starting at $0.01

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1824 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

News from Doubleday & Anchor Books

The controversy over James Frey's A Million Little Pieces has caused serious concern at Doubleday and Anchor Books. Recent interpretations of our previous statement notwithstanding, it is not the policy or stance of this company that it doesn't matter whether a book sold as nonfiction is true. A nonfiction book should adhere to the facts as the author knows them.

It is, however, Doubleday and Anchor's policy to stand with our authors when accusations are initially leveled against their work, and we continue to believe this is right and proper. A publisher's relationship with an author is based to an extent on trust. Mr. Frey's repeated representations of the book's accuracy, throughout publication and promotion, assured us that everything in it was true to his recollections. When the Smoking Gun report appeared, our first response, given that we were still learning the facts of the matter, was to support our author. Since then, we have questioned him about the allegations and have sadly come to the realization that a number of facts have been altered and incidents embellished.

We bear a responsibility for what we publish, and apologize to the reading public for any unintentional confusion surrounding the publication of A Million Little Pieces. We are immediately taking the following actions:

We are issuing a publisher's note to be included in all future printings of the book.*

James Frey has written an author's note that will appear in all future printings of the book.* Read the author's note.

The jacket for all future editions will carry the line "With new notes from the publisher and from the author."

*Customers should find the Author's Note and Publisher's Note in copies purchased from Amazon.com after April 15, 2006.

---

Note: The following editorial reviews were written before the recent revelations by James Frey and the publisher.

Amazon.com
The electrifying opening of James Frey's debut memoir, A Million Little Pieces, smash-cuts to the then 23-year-old author on a Chicago-bound plane "covered with a colorful mixture of spit, snot, urine, vomit and blood." Wanted by authorities in three states, without ID or any money, his face mangled and missing four front teeth, Frey is on a steep descent from a dark marathon of drug abuse. His stunned family checks him into a famed Minnesota drug treatment center where a doctor promises "he will be dead within a few days" if he starts to use again, and where Frey spends two agonizing months of detox confronting "The Fury" head on:

I want a drink. I want fifty drinks. I want a bottle of the purest, strongest, most destructive, most poisonous alcohol on Earth. I want fifty bottles of it. I want crack, dirty and yellow and filled with formaldehyde. I want a pile of powder meth, five hundred hits of acid, a garbage bag filled with mushrooms, a tube of glue bigger than a truck, a pool of gas large enough to drown in. I want something anything whatever however as much as I can.

One of the more harrowing sections is when Frey submits to major dental surgery without the benefit of anesthesia or painkillers (he fights the mind-blowing waves of "bayonet" pain by digging his fingers into two old tennis balls until his nails crack). His fellow patients include a damaged crack addict with whom Frey wades into an ill-fated relationship, a federal judge, a former championship boxer, and a mobster (who, upon his release, throws a hilarious surf-and-turf bacchanal, complete with pay-per-view boxing). In the book's epilogue, when Frey ticks off a terse update on everyone, you can almost hear the Jim Carroll Band's brutal survivor's lament "People Who Died" kicking in on the soundtrack of the inevitable film adaptation.

The rage-fueled memoir is kept in check by Frey's cool, minimalist style. Like his steady mantra, "I am an Alcoholic and I am a drug Addict and I am a Criminal," Frey's use of repetition takes on a crisp, lyrical quality which lends itself to the surreal experience. The book could have benefited from being a bit leaner. Nearly 400 pages is a long time to spend under Frey's influence, and the stylistic acrobatics (no quotation marks, random capitalization, left-aligned text, wild paragraph breaks) may seem too self-conscious for some readers, but beyond the literary fireworks lurks a fierce debut. --Brad Thomas Parsons

Alcoholics Anonymous - Big Book 4th Edition

AA Services

Amazon Price: $10.17 List Price: $14.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Inc. Amazon Marketplace: 81 new & used starting at $4.99

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 71 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Beware of size and price 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I am a member of A.A. and wanted to purchase a copy of the Big Book. I always shop at Amazon.com due to the great pricing and service. I just wish that Amazon would have shown me the actual product. A.A. publishes multiple sizes and covers of the Big Book and this was the only one I saw on Amazon. Unfortunately, I noticed at my next meeting that the one I was getting from Amazon was the smallest and cheapest made big book and I paid 3 times what it was worth. I kept it, but was rather annoyed with the outcome. The book is a MUST for any suffering alcoholic, or anyone who knows\lives with one. It is informative, well-written, and full of knowledge and hope. I recommend it for almost anyone.

Editorial Review:

It's more than a book. It's a way of life.

Alcoholics Anonymous-The Big Book-has served as a lifeline to millions worldwide. First published in 1939, Alcoholics Anonymous sets forth cornerstone concepts of recovery from alcoholism and tells the stories of men and women who have overcome the disease. With publication of the second edition in 1955, the third edition in 1976, and now the fourth edition in 2001, the essential recovery text has remained unchanged while personal stories have been added to reflect the growing and diverse fellowship. The long-awaited fourth edition features 24 new personal stories of recovery.

Key features and benefits
·the most widely used resource for millions of individuals in recovery
·contains full, original text describing A.A. the program
·updated with 24 new personal stories

Motivational Interviewing, Second Edition: Preparing People for Change

William R. Miller, Stephen Rollnick

Amazon Price: $36.98 List Price: $49.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: The Guilford Press Amazon Marketplace: 55 new & used starting at $34.98

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Subjects -> Health, Mind & Body -> Relationships -> Interpersonal Relations
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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 16 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Extremely fast shipping 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Received book two days after I ordered it. Book was plastic-wrapped and in excellent condition. Would definitely buy from here again; this was a great buying experience.

Editorial Review:

Since the initial publication of this breakthrough work, motivational interviewing (MI) has been used by countless clinicians. Theory and methods have evolved apace, reflecting new knowledge on the process of behavior change, a growing body of outcome research, and the development of new applications within and beyond the addictions field. Extensively rewritten, this revised and expanded second edition now brings MI practitioners and trainees fully up to date. William R. Miller and Stephen Rollnick explain how to work through ambivalence to facilitate change, present detailed guidelines for using their approach, and reflect on the process of learning MI. Chapters contributed by other leading experts then address such special topics as MI and the stages-of-change model, applications in medical, public health, and criminal justice settings, and using the approach with groups, couples, and adolescents.