Leaving the Bucket: Searching for the Sacred in Addiction

By Ralph Thurston

The seventeen essays of Leaving the Bucket give a philosophical close-up of living inside, outside, and around the context of alchoholism and other forms of addiction. The collection is an insightful look at what drives an individual toward change while paradoxically leaving him in a static context that seems impossible to exit. Set in rural Southeast Idaho in the late 1970s, the book chronicles the simultaneous eruption of a tavern in a teetotaling community and the author's Dionysian journey. With reflections on topics ranging from the vulgar to the sacred, the book illuminates the internal wars that lead to addiction, the knotted behavior which has been called a disease by modern medicine but which may instead be an intense version of the drive toward historical change-a drive mimicked at all levels of existence, from the personal to the social to the ecological. Detailing what happens when the urge to change meets the lack of opportunity to do so, Leaving the Bucket will leave its readers as changed as the community it describes.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0DRHXJNLK
• ISBN13: 9798304776172
• Release Date: July 2005
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 194 Pages
• Weight: 0.59 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.0" x 9.0"