Mel B.
It is a common practice in the fellowship of AA today to say, "I'm a friend of Bill's." Often, when in doubt or afraid to ask directly if someone is an AA member, people ask, "Are you a friend of Bill's?" During Bill's lifetime, the expression "friend of Bill W." wasn't used. Although Bill had no wish to be remembered this way, it is significant that people who never knew him refer to themselves as his friend.
page xv, paragraph 7
Twelve Step members are often reminded that it's not an "I" program but a "we" program.
page xvi, paragraph 1, lines 1 & 2
...Bill succeeded in confounding a movement that functions as AA does. The theory emerging from my search was that seven Bill Wilsons--or at least seven sides of the same man--worked in harness to form and build AA.
Who were the seven Bill Wilsons? The first was a power-driving achiever. Another was a fixer, a third wa an individualist, and a fourth was an entrepreneur. There were also a communicator, a peacemaker, and a founder/statesman.
page 4, paragraph 2, lines 2-5 & paragraph 5, lines 1-5
...I learned from Bill Wilson that the alcoholic is responsible for finding and maintaining his or her own sobriety, so other people cannot be either credited or blamed for whatever condition we are in. Bill Wilson also believed in expressing continuous gratitude for any help we ar given...
page 7, paragraph 1, lines 11-16
Ebby's message caught Bill Wilson at just the right time, when he was in a prolonged drinking session and had lost hope. After struggling with Ebby's proposition for several days, he returned to the hospital for drying out and in the process had what he later described as a spiritual experience, on an illumination. This changed his life and also set him on a new course: helping other alcoholics by carrying the same message that had led him to sobriety. He discovered that working with others resulted hi spiritual renewal for himself and served to rescue him from self-pity and depression.
page 12, paragraph 1
His success in the market rested on the shaky foundation of margin trading, which allowed speculators to purchase stocks by actually paying only a fraction of their price. This is a marvelous way to make money in a rising market, but it's a prescription for disaster when prices fall. When prices fall, margin traders receive "margin calls," requiring them to pay in additional funds. It they can't comply, they are wiped out.
An investor who owns stocks outright suffers "paper losses" in a falling market but still has the choice of simply sitting tight and waiting for prices to rebound. The margin traders don't have that choice; they are forced to sell if they cannot make up a portion of the losses. At the same time, their other assets are at risk of being attached by creditors. This is what helped turn the 1929 market decline into a total collapse, since the selling snowballed when speculators had to put additional stocks on the market to cover their margin calls.
page 68, paragraph 2, lines 3-1- & paragraph 3
The Oxford Group had been founded by a Lutheran minister named Frank Buchman, who continued as its principal leader until his death in 1961. Using the same tools that were later formalized as the AA program, he founded a fellowship that had amazing success in helping turn around the lives of troubled people. Buchman was a gifted and talented man who had an uncanny ability to perceive another person's trouble and help him with it. The approach was spiritual, and Buchman was unapologetic in offering divine guidance as the way out of trouble. His fellowship had also had considerable success in aiding alcoholics in finding sobriety, though this was not its main purpose.
Though called a cult by some, Buchman and the Oxford Group had become well known in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In 1936, for example, a large Oxford Group rally received national publicly, and Frank Buchman was featured on the cover of Time magazine. This was at a time when Bill and Lois Wilson were struggling members of the Oxford Group in Manhattan.
But trouble was just around the corner. In a newspaper interview, Buchman made statements that cast him as a Hilter sympathizer, if not an actual admirer of the Nazi dictator. The story was published in New York City, where there was already rising concern about Hilter's intentions and the vicious actions he was taking against Germany's Jewish population. The story's headline portrayed Buchman as saying the he "thanked God for a man like Adolf Hilter," while the body copy explained that Buchman viewed the Nazis as a bulwark against "godless Communism."
This was one of the several reasons that led Bill Wilson to part with the Oxford Group the following year, but he later described the group as "falling fast in the public favor." More than anything, the perceived Hilter connection had damage the group's standing, and by 1938 its name was changed to Moral Re-Armament (MRA). Buchman never repudiated his statements made in the famous interview, and to this day the impression continues that the Oxford Group was somehow linked with Nazism.
page 107, paragraph 4 & page 108