Pioneer Stories in Alcoholics Anonymous: God's Role in Recovery Confirmed! by Dick B. and Ken B. presents many quotations from the 29 personal stories included in the first edition of Alcoholics Anonymous. Those stories by many of A.A.'s pioneers testify to roles played by God, His Son Jesus Christ, and the Bible in early A.A.'s astonishing successes with "medically-incurable" alcoholics.
During 1934 and 1944 in Calcutta, Stephen Smith worked alone and unsupported on developing rocket transport. In 1935, he was the first to demonstrate the successful transport by a rocket of livestock, food and medicine. This book charts the story of Stephen H Smith, described by a contemporary as “the greatest one-man campaign for rocketry”. He dedicated his life to working alone in northeast India to develop a new revolutionary means of transport using only rocket power. The development of rockets in India is commonly understood to have ended with Tipu Sultan in 1799 and started again in 1963 with what is now called the Indian Space Research Organisation. However, in the intervening period, one man built and championed rockets, working alone in Calcutta. In 1925 he set up the Indian Air Mail Society, and it is amongst the global philatelic community where his work is still known but is almost entirely forgotten from the popular imagination in India. On 14 February 1891, Stephen H Smith, the only son of a tea plantation manager originally from Norfolk, England, was born in the Strawberry Hill region of Shillong. Between 1934 and 1944, he conducted over 200 rocket experiments to demonstrate the utility of a rocket as a means of transport. Small self-funded groups to develop rockets were established in USSR, USA, Britain, Australia and Germany. From these groups, Sergei Korolev and Wernher von Braun emerged and competed in the epic space race that resulted in Sputnik, Gagarin and Apollo 11. Stephen H Smith was their contemporary but worked alone and unsupported in India. Long after he had died, he was inducted into the Hall of Fame by the American Airmail Society in 1989. In 1992, a year after the centenary of his birth, the Indian government celebrated his achievements by issuing a stamp and a first-day cover dedicated to his work. Today his work is found in official NASA publications, the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society and the National Air and Space Museum. This new study of his contacts with the King of Sikkim, King George V, with a member of parliament in London and a 25-year-long correspondence with a Swiss philatelist reveals in his own words his struggle to attain recognition and support for his work. His reluctant attempt to work with the military authorities in India during World War II ended in frustration. His multiple attempts in 1949 to contact the Governor of Bengal and Prime Minister Nehru in the newly independent India failed to generate a response.
Two war diaries that reveal “just what it was like, day by day, living in a Wehrmacht unit” (Internet Modeler). This book is built around two recently discovered war diaries—one by a member of the 23rd Panzer Division, which served under Manstein in Russia, and the other by a member of Rommel’s Afrika Korps. Together, along with detailed timelines and brief overviews, they comprise a fascinating up-close look at the German side of World War II. The stories are told primarily in the first person present tense, as events occurred, and without the benefit—or liability—of postwar reflection. The first diary, author unknown, covers April 1942 to March 1943, the momentous year when the tide of battle turned in the East. It first details the unit’s combat in the great German victory at Kharkov, then the advance to the Caucasus, and finally the lethal winter of 1942–43. The second diary’s author was a soldier named Rolf Krengel, and the diary was the original, handwritten copy. It starts with the beginning of the war and ends shortly after the occupation. Serving primarily in North Africa, Krengel recounts with keen insight and flashes of humor the day-to-day challenges of the Afrika Korps. During one of the swirling battles in the desert, Krengel found himself sharing a tent with Rommel at a forward outpost. Neither of the diarists was famous, nor of especially high rank. These are simply the brutally honest accounts written at the time by men of the Wehrmacht who participated in two of history’s most crucial campaigns.
Dick B. is a writer, historian, Bible student, retired attorney, and active recovered member of A.A. He has sponsored more than 100 men in their recovery. Dick has devoted 18 years of his life to researching the spiritual roots of A.A. and has now published 33 titles on the subject with more to come. His special attention to the early Akron program which had a documented 75% success rate among seemingly hopeless, medically incurable real alcoholics who went to any lengths to establish their relationship and fellowship with the Creator has made this a landmark study resource of students of Old School A.A.--students who want to utilize the program and achieve the successes of the 1930's.
