Jack Erdmann delivers a gift - a brutally honest true story about one man's struggle with alcohol. However, this book is more than just a book about alcohol and alcoholics - it is a great story, period. The language may be raw or lyrical, and the story is heartbreaking, funny, and ultimately filled with hope. If you enjoy this book read 'Whiskey's Children', by the same author.

What a wonderful, wonderful book about the recovery and the real life application of the
twelve steps that have taken a man from hell into sobriety and sanity. This is a inspiring
honest book about a man who finds hope and the miracles that follow.
A great book !!

Absolutely hilarious take on life and it's many different paths. A great read!

My dissertation at university is on eating disorders, so I've been reading quite widely on the subject. Geneen Roth's books had been recommended to me for ages, so I decided I should start with this one: maybe it was the wrong choice as an introduction to her work, maybe not. I guess I'll find out after reading the rest of her books.

Mind you, this is NOT a disappointing book: Not at all. It contains good, very useful ideas, and it makes clear points. The basic, no-diet philosophy of Roth is valid & makes sense. And since this is a self-help book, it helps that the author uses examples, little stories, & catchy titles. From cover to cover, it can be read in a couple of hours, but I think it's better to read the ideas more slowly, savouring & trying to understand each one better.

"When you eat at the refrigerator..." is NOT a bad book: it's just that these things have been said before, & (in my opinion) much better, for example, by Susie Orbach. Maybe Orbach concetrates more on the theoretical part & Roth tackles the more practical, self-help part. I don't know. And maybe Roth has covered more theory in her other books. But this book, for me, was lacking in theoretical explanation of the ideas presented, & so most of these ideas seemed like little gimmicks to me. But, as a beginnning book, a book of ideas that can lead to other similar books, it's not bad.

Geneen Roth is right on target, AGAIN. If you've never read Ms. Roth's books, then this is a great introduction to her philosophy. If you're familiar with her work, then you'll quickly discover that this IS a moveable feast - the portable Roth.

My one criticism, and maybe Ms. Roth will correct this in future printings, is the Table of Contents. This book is supposed to be 'a take along' to be read in bits and pieces as time allows and mood suggests. But when you want to find a nugget, the Table of Contents is a hindrance, not a help. I'm just a reader, not a book editor but below is an excerpt from the current layout and a recommended, improved Table of Contents:

Current:
4.Give Away Clothes that Cut Off Your
Circulation/22 5.Consider Howard Stern and
Live 'As If'/26 6. Learn to Recognize a
Fat-and-Ugly Attack/29 7. Emergency . . .

Suggested
4.Give Away Clothes that Cut Off Your Circulation___22
5.Consider Howard Stern and Live 'As If'__________26
6.Learn to Recognize a Fat-and-Ugly Attack________29
7.Emergency Interventions_____________________34

geneen roth does a fabulous job discussing our relationships between food and love, then giving you ways to change that relationship. it is NOT a diet book. it is a book to make you think.

Jack has a great story to tell but unfortunately is unable to tell it. The writing style barely skims the surface of the emotions and skips off at tangents leaving the reader wanting to connect but unable too. Unlike Angela's Ashes, this book read flat, devoid of real emotion, and with no apparent depth. My hat is off to Mister Erdmann for surviving and having the strength to tell the tale, I just wish it had been told more.

Whiskey's Children touched me far more than Angela's Ashes. It hit me in emotional places I hadn't visited for a long, long time. The prose was brilliant. As Annie Lamott the New York Times Best Selling Author wrote in her forward: "a story so beautifully told it will leave you shaking with wonder". Exactly! When I read the rave reviews on the jacket I was struck by Senator George McGovern's remarks: "Heartbreaking and soaring. A testament of survivial and hope for all who suffer from this affliction". D. May

I believe Whiskey's Children is the most powerful and inspirational book ever written on alcoholism.

Everyone who loves a fast and gripping read should run, not walk, to the nearest bookstore and pick one up.

Jack Erdmann has walked the walk of an alcoholic and takes us inside the mind, heart and soul of the person that is hopelessly addicted. The emotional trauma that is involved in the machine of a family disease is gut renching. I cried and I laughed and I held my breath. Nobody knows the incomprehensible hold of alcohol like this author. I have read many books about the disease of alcohol and recovery testamonials but this book lays it on the line like no other. There is hope for the alcoholic and that comes shinning through in Mr. Erdmann's book. The machinery has to stop somewhere in the family of the alcoholic. It seems to be a genetic, inherited disease that needs early intervention. People do not have to go through the hell Jack did if they will heed the warning signs. Friends and family have a mandatory responsibility to intervene when the signals of alcohol or addiction are waving frantically in their faces. A great book!!!!

My mother and my best friend each gave me a copy of this book a week after my daughter was born. I read it as I nursed, savoring each section and not wanting it to end. Since none of my girlfriends were mothers, I felt entirely alone in the world except for Anne Lamott; I depended on her to voice my rage, joy, fear, and love. I wished to God that I'd had a support system like she had. I'll never forget driving to the store a week after my daughter was born; in about 20 minutes, the "jungle drums" that Anne wrote about began pounding in my brain -- gotta get home!!! It was so fresh and real and clear, and helped get me through the most difficult period of my life. Thank you, Anne, from the bottom of my heart.

I read this book at the end of my son's first year. He was the third child and I thought we had this "kid thing" down pat. Anne LaMott gently showed me that each little boy or girl is not just a little bundle of fun to add to life's blessings, but the foundation of a life rededicated to accepting sorrow, looking for hope and bringing joy. She drags herself forward, out of a less than perfect past, with a soft, radiant humor that almost belies the pain and regret she has struggled to overcome. I was completely charmed...enchanted by the wonder she felt and so richly, beautifully shares....and laughing my self silly at trials and tribulations offered up with her trademark sweet sensitivity and self-deprecation. Hey! she told me, there's nothing routine about your baby! Not this little life...nor mine, I learned. Thanks, Anne...

I bought this book while I was pregnant. I took it home and read it in one night.I laughed out loud so hard, my husband kept looking in on me. I lent it to my mother and she thought it was too sad and depressing. I have reread it so many times since my son was born, there are so many ways to relate to anne's experience. This book has inspired me by keeping my own journal and I have tried to enliven it with more heartfelt entries. I was touched by the honesty of her writing, feelings most people would be ashamed to admit. I have always wondered how Sam turned out and if Anne fell in love and got married. Please write a sequel.

This author is a new find for me, but I will surely read much more of her. She is fabulously funny, incredibly informative, and absolutely generous with her thoughts and feelings and expertise on writing. The book warmed me, and made me feel that I could continue my writing with a stronger and better perspective. For aspiring writer's everywhere, and for writers published and not, this book will take you on a journey and offer invaluable advice for your hard work. It will help you revive that natural urge to write and keep you plugging away at the keyboard during the very worst of slumps. You will also laugh with Anne Lamott, the author, who is hilarious and honest and very witty. The practical and real life advice will stay with you as you struggle to become the writer you already are.

Reading Anne Lamott is like sitting down with a close friend who shares all of your idiosyncracies and insanities, as well as your warped sense of humor. Bird by Bird gives Lamott's view of the writing life and confronts all of the little details and major crises faced by anyone who's ever wanted to write. Filled with warm and witty anecdotes from her own writing career and from the classes she teaches, Lamott takes you gently by the hand and then proceeds to push, pull, or drag you to the pencil or the keyboard because you suddenly feel that you have to write something, right now! This is a book to keep next to the bed or the computer, or wherever else you're likely to be when you need a nudge to keep going and a major dose of inspiration. Read this book with a highlighter grasped tightly in your sweaty palm, because you're going to want to come back to certain lines over and over again. Highly recommended.

Here's the thing: I KNOW Anne Lamott loves writing fiction, and she's helluv good at it. But I swear she's at her best when writing nonfiction. Afterall, it was Bird by Bird and Operating Instructions that put her over the top; then she followed up with Traveling Mercies. The quality and longevity of her fiction pale by comparison.
Bird by Bird is simply one of the three best books on the angst of writing and being a writer that's ever been written. The other two are Writing Down the Bones and S. King's On Writing. But the three books are very, very different. King's is actually pretty weird in spots, as he is, but for the most part it's all about philosophy. Natalie Goldberg's 'Bones' is very instructional and inspirational.
But Lamott! Oh, Annie's book is just as outrageously honest and funny and true and painful in the telling as it is in actuality to be a writer.
Wonderful, wonderful book; highest recommendation.
Read it.
If you're a writer, you'll get some advice from a master on how to cope with (or not) self-doubt, writer's block, and jealousy. But read it anyway, even if you're not the least bit interested in being a writer but just happen to like her other books; you won't be disappointed.

I bought this book the day that I found out my father had terminal cancer. The writing is insightful, touching, funny and amazingly human. Without this book, that next year would have been a completely different experience. Tonight I found myself, over three years later, reading excerpts to a friend over the phone. I came to Amazon.com tonight to send her a link to this page, so she can get a copy for herself. After all, I wouldn't give mine up for the world.

Annie Lamott shows us the modern path to Christ in this twisted, comical, and grossly honest book! Not for the timid reader but still for the Christian who wishes to read about experiences vastly different than their own. Annie supports abortion, homosexuality, and Feminism. She does not hide her support of these causes, she only claims to have found Christ in the midst of them. No one can deny that she is HONEST, in fact, she is what I would call a HARDCORE HONESTY JUNKIE. She does not pretend to be something she is not. She brings a whole new dimension to the Gospel of Grace! The beauty is that God does love her, as he loves each of us regardless of our upbringing, political position, and/or emotinal stability. A surprisingly inspirational book!

This book restored my faith in writing and in the wisdom that pain brings. It's funny and spiritual and comfortable yet it pushes you a little out of your comfort zones. She has a very paradoxical faith that resists easy categroies which shows that she is really honest. How many of us fit in to these models, really? Liberal, evangelical, relativist, absolutist, Darwinist, creationist (young earth or old???) we all deep down are walking contradictions. Ms. Lamott's writing focuses on the experiences she went through with an honesty that resists these models. She's messy, like the rest of us when we are in the dark. And Jesus still loves her and the rest of us, even when we are at our messiest.

Read this book. You wont regret it!

It was refreshing to read about motherhood from this book's collective perspective, but after a while it became tedious. I think it would have been fantastic if it had been edited down to a four page article that included only the best excerpts of stories. By the time one has finished the book it is apparent that "Mothers Who Whine a Lot" would have been a more appropriate title. I didn't find any great thoughtful revelations it was just a collection of the most honest, but whiny moments of a tired mother.

Most of the essays in this slim but powerful book originally appeared in the Mothers Who Think column on Salon.com, including a real winner by Anne Lamott. Although they vary tremendously in tone, subject, angle, and focus, all together they create a powerfully articulate image of what it means to be Mother. And I'm talking Mother in a minute, interior sense, not in the do-goody style of parenting magazines. There's nothing soapy or sappy in any of these essays - so read it.

This was a great book! It has a variety of essays, focussing on the theme of motherhood. I was very moved by some of them (Beth Kephart's essay about her son's efforts to play soccer; Ariel Gore's about being stuck in the hell that is family court), but also laughed at many places throughout. The "Drama Queen for a Day" short essays were great for the title as well as content.

I was also struck by the depth of emotion expressed by the authors. Reading this book, I felt that it was telling the truth about being a mother; the emotion you feel towards your children is the strongest you'll ever experience.

This, Anne Lamott's first novel, is the poignant story the narrator's father's battle with brain cancer and how the whole family copes with his condition. Largely autobiographical fiction, as most of Lamott's work is, the story rings true to life--and, after all, isn't it when faced with death or the death of a loved one that we tend to see life differently? A huge Anne Lamott fan, I reluctantly give this book four stars because I hold Lamott to such high standards. The story does meander once or twice into tangents not related to story or characters, and her style is not as clean as in her later books (but who can blame the author for that--it was her first book after all). However, Lamott's humor, as always, helps bring the book together, showing the ups and downs of dealing with her father's illness. I especially recommend the book to those who have a loved one suffering from cancer or similar illness.

Laughter can be forced or cheap or light - and then there are the moments when the laughter is best, usually because there is some equal pressure not to laugh, some pain that is so close it hurts to laugh, but you must anyway. Anne Lamott wrote, what is for me, an exquisite book about an unspeakable time in life - when a parent becomes gravely ill.

I believe in these characters - precisely because they aren't predictable or tidy. They have big gaps in their development, like most people do. They fall apart and put themselves back together in unexpected, astonishing ways. Each one survives in spite of and because of their love of one another.

It is a book of unusual relationships during the days of an extraordinary time. Lamott introduces each character and their actions with a generous spirit. The reader by turns loves, understands, is appalled by, then forgives and loves again each of them.

I hated to leave them when the book was over. I wanted to have a beer with them, to take a walk on the beach with them, to laugh with them long and hard at how much life hurts sometimes - and how grand it is to be alive.

I recommend this book to anyone who knows the pain and joy of loving extraordinary people. If you want a large-hearted soul to spend time with, read Anne Lamott's "Hard Laughter" - you won't be disappointed.

In this funny and inspiring story Anne Lamott shows us the importance of good friends, close family, and hard laughter. Through the characters' struggles with relationships, careers, and death, we discover the true strength of the human heart: the ability to find beauty in, and endure through, rough times. An important lesson in life and love, highlighted by laugh-out-loud funny lines, make this book memorable and worth experiencing.

The novel, Crooked Little Heart, by Anne Lamott, revolves around a main character named Rosie who is a teenager. Rosie lives with her mother, who is a recovering alcoholic and her stepfather. She has a best friend named Simone who is her exact opposite and together, they play tennis and they live in the Bay Area. Rosie also deals with a man named Luther who has an obsession for her. I really enjoyed reading this book. On a scale of one to ten, I would give it a nine. I liked this book because the author narrated with different characters so that the reader got a different perspective on each obstacle and event. Right away I was into the book, but towards the middle I lost interest for about ten pages. For a while the author began to discuss things that seemed to have absolutely no relevance to the current story line. The novel was a medium challenge for me. I found the vocabulary to be rather adult and sometimes the author made references to things that I didn't know about. Overall, most people my age could handle this easily without much trouble and it wasn't too hard or old for me. Something that people might have difficultiy with in this book were the issues it dealt with regarding Rosie's mother alcoholism or her emotional problems. To get through these difficulties they could read it with someone so that they could discuss the confusion that they had with reading it, and talk about things that bothered them.

Lamott's latest novel, Crooked Little Heart, is the story of a family of the 90's confronting both the new questions of a blended family and age-old issues of human relationships. Respectively, Elizabeth, the mother; Rosie, her teenage daughter; and James, the step-father; face their own questions of unresolved grief, coming of age in the 90's, and the struggles of an aspiring writer. With varying degrees of success, Lamott combines her characteristic style of irreverentwit, hilarity, and candor to unveil very real and human characters to the reader. The two women characters are the most well-developed. As Rosie negotiates the competitive tennis tournament circuit, the pain and perils of an adolescent girl growing toward womanhood are skillfully explored. With Lamott's background as a writer, the reader might expect more character development of the stepfather-writer. (P)However, I find that Lamott's book is well written. Her metaphors for human feelings and relationships are sensitive, humorous, and thought-provoking. Throughout the story, the presence of a transient man in the bleachers at tennis matches lends suspense to the novel. As the story unfolds, the reader is treated to a family that perseveres despite individual and family secrets. Together these characters struggle in a very human way and with "crooked little hears" to become a family and make sense of the human condition

Crooked Little Heart is a moving story about a girl named Rosie Ferguson and her jump into adolescence. Rosie is obsessed with tennis, and often competes in tournaments with her best friend Simone. From the sidelines a mysterious man constantly observes Rosie and seems to be up to no good. He frightens Rosie's recovering alcoholic mother, and Rosie is warned to stay away from him. Yet she doesn't always listen to her mother.

If I were to rate this book on a scale of 1 to 10, I would rate this book an eight. This book was enjoyable to read, with an interesting storyline that always moved forward. The first paragraph immediately brings you into the world of the story, giving you background on the character's lives. The only drawback in reading this book was the tennis lingo. Because I am not familiar with the game of tennis and do not understand how the scoring works, at times I couldn't understand what was going on in the game. Although this didn't matter with the overall plot of the book, it sometimes distracted me from the story.

Anne Lamott is gifted in her ability to describe situations and events. On page 37 she writes, "At one point she raced after a lob that went over her at the net, and she lobbed it back so brilliantly, sending it over both boys at the net, that even Simone looked bashful and victorious when the boys shook their heads with amazement, and Luther laughed a loud throaty laugh of appreciation and something like joy, as if she had done a magic trick, and when Rosie looked up and accidentally met his eyes, he took her picture with an imaginary camera." In addition she does a thorough job in describing important details about every character, and is always reinforcing the relationships between them. Because of Lamott's wonderful ability to put the story together in a manner that continuously flows, the story is enjoyable to read.

This book reminded me of another book, Anywhere but Here, because both books involve the relationship of mother and daughter. Although their plots are very different; one takes place during a move to California and the other on a tennis court, the theme of family lurks in both. In both stories you get a sense of what it's like to be a mother, and the feelings they face while their child travels through adolescence.

I think anyone who enjoys sports, especially tennis, would enjoy this book. But in my book club group, the girls seemed to enjoy the book a little bit more than the boys. If you're looking for an enjoyable read, with life-like experiences, this is the book for you.