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Into Action is filled with fresh, original stories illustrating the many different ways members work the “simple program for complicated people” that is Alcoholics Anonymous. Though it is known, honored, and imitated throughout the world as a Twelve Step program, the Steps are only one element in a well-rounded AA program. Lasting recovery from our “rapacious creditor” takes place within a richly varied program of action.

The Twelve Steps are carefully designed to lead us safely along a path into the sunlight of sobriety. Joining them are the Traditions, which call upon the Fellowship’s history to insure AA a healthy stability and growth. Our literature inspires and guides us with the experience of the alcoholics who came before us. At the heart of AA are our meetings, held all over the world, where the Fellowship comes alive and mutual support is the keyword.

AA service activities can be as varied as our different personalities, permitting us to give back what has been so freely given us. Alcoholism is a lonely business, and one wise answer to that is our tradition of sponsorship, another example of service that results in mutual advantage. Even the slogans on our walls—“Easy Does It,” “Live and Let Live” among them—are not peripheral to our sobriety, but prove themselves to be reliably portable tools to be called upon when we most need them.

The stories and letters in this book, from the pages of AA Grapevine, published since 1944, bring our program and our Fellowship to life. In the story “Unprepared,” the author, deployed to Iraq, considers the AA literature he packs in his duffle bag to be his real “ammunition,” protection from the deadliest enemy of all. A resistant newcomer’s temporary sponsor finally gets him to a pizza parlor in “Sponsor-Temping,” where he is astonished to hear the liberating laughter of sobriety for the first time.

A mother must cut our slogan “One Day at a Time” down to fifteen-minute increments when waiting for a doctor to call with her child’s life-changing diagnosis in “A Mother’s Nightmare.” In “Welcome to Leetown,” a member analyzes why her Tuesday night Step meeting warms her heart so, admitting that the welcome she receives reminds her of the hit TV series, Cheers.

Each of these stories illustrates the truth that, no matter what our backgrounds, our locations, our ages, our genders, our politics, our financial status, we achieve lasting sobriety by getting into action and working the dynamic, multi-faceted program of Alcoholics Anonymous.