Book Synopsis
This book describes how meetings were held (citing eyewitness accounts from that time) and what was being taught in Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in Akron and Cleveland during the formative period that stretched from 1938 to 1942. The book includes a section on the list of ten books that the Akron Manual recommended that all their new people read, including Emmet Fox’s Sermon on the Mount, Henry Drummond’s book on 1 Corinthians 13, James Allen’s As a Man Thinketh, and Abundant Living by E. Stanley Jones. The last part of the book talks about the four different spiritual traditions that early Alcoholics Anonymous drew upon, and what the early A.A. people learned from each of these traditions: (1) the Oxford Group, (2) early American frontier revivalism, (3) the New Thought ideas found in Emmet Fox’s book on the Sermon on the Mount, and (4) the classical Protestant liberalism of The Upper Room with its emphasis upon feeling, intuition, simplicity, and the religion of the heart.