Nearly 100,000 U.S. students between 18 and 24 reported
alcohol-related sexual assault or date rape during the past 12 months.
If you would like to
know how that happened – and the positive results that have flowed from my
experiences, you may find my book, War
Baby, helpful. I wrote it to be so.
Almost 700,000 students said they had experienced
alcohol-related assaults during the year.
More than 1,800 college-aged individuals were killed in
alcohol-related accidents, including vehicular.
Almost 18 million adult Americans are alcoholic, and the
problems they cause cost our economy more than $225 billion a year.
These stats are from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse
and Alcoholism, a division of the National Institutes of Health. You can read more here.
Go to the link, and you will see. We have big problems with
chemical dependency illness. And I should know.
I was a statistic earlier in life. But I found the way out.
Today it has been more than 40 years since I stopped
drinking and found successful recovery from alcoholism.
If you would like to
know how that happened – and the positive results that have flowed from my
experiences, you may find my book, War
Baby, helpful. I wrote it to be so.
War Baby is available here as a paperback and as an e-book. This is how I introduce it to
would-be readers:
How does a life go so awry
that a bright and generous upbringing turns to thoughts of slamming a nine-millimeter Luger bullet
through one’s temporal lobe?
That’s the fulcrum War
Baby twists upon, as a hopeful upbringing
goes off the tracks to an insane slow slog into active alcoholism, the Luger
always lurking just outside life’s stage-lights.
The book grew out of
more than 30 years of personal journaling. But the result is not just some
“journaling adventure.” It sticks with the guts of the near-death experience
active alcoholism can bring to a life – mine.
With drama, humor, and
pathos, my life is redeemed in a true story told for those who are seekers of
what Dante described in the first canto of The Divine Comedy, Inferno, “the path that does not stray.”
Yet the book’s three
broad themes – the dark of a personal bottom, the light of a stable childhood,
and a denouement of crazy experiences – lead not to some Pollyannaish “new
life.” Rather, with humor offsetting more than a few living nightmares – War
Baby follows an unexpected and challenging
path, and how it looks after a 40-year sojourn.
The story plays out
scenically, and I dedicate it to “The Seekers,” those who would follow “the
path,” their families, friends, and many
others who will be perhaps surprised by the wisdom that can be found along the
way. Many seek but not all find the way to recovery; but to those who do seek,
it is to them I write in the hope that
they will hear what I heard and see what I saw.
