The Little House on Genessee

John S. turned his little house on Genessee Avenue in Fort Wayne, Indiana, into a place where he sponsored, over the years, a long series of alcoholics and addicts, and led them to sobriety through Alcoholics Anonymous and the twelve steps. Many of these people came from very rough backgrounds, including hardened ex-cons and people who rode in motorcycle gangs, but what you see in them now is a combination of strength and gentleness, of fearlessness and kindness, and of what is still the old toughness, but mixed now with a marvelous depth of love and spiritual presence. In this book he and seven of the people he sponsored tell the story of how their alcoholism and addiction led them into lives of desperation and despair, but how practicing a set of simple daily actions enabled them to recover from their seemingly hopeless affliction. In John's early life he was a great sailor, using St. John in the Virgin Islands as his base and taking fast sailboats for adventure and commerce through the waters of the Southern Atlantic and Caribbean Sea. He worked for many years at a special martial arts dojo, and rode motorcycles which could outrun anything else on the road. But in 1985, he put aside alcohol and drugs, and by 1994 he was devising the method which he lays out in this book. Eleven of the first twelve people he tried it on got sober and stayed sober. It is built on the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, the Joe and Charlie tapes, and the teachings of the good Fort Wayne physician Dr. Zweig. John boils it down into something so simple that anyone can understand how to do it. And it works! People all over John's part of the country have seen it work for the past 18 years, again and again, for the toughest, the angriest, the most rebellious, and the most self-destructive alcoholics and addicts in the world.