Une critique parue en octobre 1939 dans le Journal of the American Medical Association a qualifié le livre comme « un curieux mélange de propagande organisée et d’exhortation religieuse… certainement pas un livre scientifique ».
Vol. 113(16), October 14, 1939
ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS. The story of how more than one hundred men have recovered from alcoholism. Cloth. Price $3.50. 400 pp.. New York: Works Publishing Company. 1939. The seriousness of the psychiatric and social problem represented by addiction to alcohol is generally underestimated by those not immediately familiar with the tragedies in the families of victims or the resistance addicts offer to any effective treatment. Many psychiatrists regard addiction to alcohol as having a more pessimistic prognosis than schizophrenia. For many pears the public was beguiled into believing that short courses of enforced abstinence and catharsis in "institutes" and "rest homes" would do the trick, and now that the failure of such temporizing has become common knowledge, a considerable number of other forms of quack treatment have sprung up. The book under review is a curious combination of organizing propaganda and religious exhortation. It is in no sense a scientific book, although it is introduced by a letter from a physician who claims to know some of the anonymous contributors who have been "cured" of addiction to alcohol and have joined together in an organization which would save other addicts by a kind of religious conversion. The book contains instructions as to how to intrigue the alcoholic addict into the acceptance of divine guidance in place of alcohol in terms strongly reminiscent of Dale Carnegie and the adherents of the Buchman ("Oxford") movement. The one valid thing in the book is the recognition of the seriousness of addiction to alcohol Other than this, the book has no scientific merit or interest.
De même, le Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease a rapporté que le Gros Livre était « rempli de belles paroles… des élucubrations d’une bande d’illuminés… Il n’a jamais été question du sens profond de l’alcoolisme. Tout est traité de façon superficielle ».
JOURNAL OF NERVOUS AND MENTAL DISEASE
Vol. 92(3), September 1940, pg 399 & 400
ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS: How more than one hundred men have recovered from alcoholism. (New York: Works Publishing Company, Church St. Annex P.C., $3.50.) As a youth we attended many "experience" meetings more as an onlooker than as a participant. We never could work ourselves up into a lather and burst forth in soapy bubbly phrases about our intimate states of feeling. That was our own business rather than something to brag about to the neighbours. Neither then nor now do we lean to the autobiographical, save occasionally by allusion to point a moral or adorn a tale, as the ancient adage puts it. This big book, i.e. big in words, is a rambling sort of camp meeting confession of experiences, told in the form of biographies of various alcoholics who had been to a certain institution and have provisionally recovered, chiefly under the influence of the "big brothers get together spirit." Of the inner meaning of alcoholism there is hardly a word. It is all on the surface material. Inasmuch as the alcoholic, speaking generally, lives a wish-fulfilling infantile regression to the omnipotent delusional state, perhaps he is best handled for the time being at least by regressive mass psychological methods, in which, as is realized, religious fervors belong, hence the religious trend of the book . Billy Sunday and similar orators had their successes but we think the methods of Forel and of Bleuler infinitely superior.
Dans la critique, on « dénigre » aussi l’alcoolique : « Dans la mesure où l’alcoolique, en général, vit une régression infantile souhaitée de l’état de désillusion omnipotent, il est peut-être mieux traité actuellement, au moins par des méthodes psychologiques de régression massive qui appartiennent, comme il le constatera, à la ferveur religieuse, d’où provient la tendance religieuse du livre ».
Bon, si vous voulez quand même 
acheter la réédition facsimilé du 1° tirage 1° édition (10 avril 1939 - 4730 exemplaires) : http://0z.fr/w2R24
Et pour ceux/celles qui sont des "Big Book Thumpers" ("fanatiques du Big Book") : http://0z.fr/YSHlf
