"The End of My Addiction" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 330 pages, $25) -- part memoir, part medical mystery -- has at its heart a bold claim: There is a happy-making pill that can cure alcoholism. More than 100,000 people die from alcoholism in the United States every year, making Olivier Ameisen's claims for the drug baclofen a world-changing discovery.

Baclofen certainly changed Ameisen's life. A renowned cardiologist and scion of a wealthy French family, Ameisen began drinking heavily in early middle age. Like many drunks, his story begins with a few benders and ends with hospitalizations, financial ruin and the widespread dispersion of heartbreak. Like a lot of drunks, he did not succeed with either in-patient treatment centers or with Alcoholics Anonymous. After years of failure, he began to suspect that there had to be another solution:

"I could not utilize the life lessons of AA. ... Desperately trying as hard as possible to stay with the program, only to relapse because of overwhelming craving, is the rule, not the exception. ... It defies common sense, as well as the accumulating scientific evidence, to say that all [addicts] are deficient in willpower, moral virtue, and/or spiritual faith."

This is where the medical mystery begins. After reading a New York Times article on baclofen's promise in treating cocaine addiction, Ameisen began digging around for studies of its use in the treatment of alcoholism. To his disappointment, there had been just one small study in Italy. And so, in the tradition of Jonas Salk, Ameisen began prescribing baclofen for his most desperate patient: himself. And it worked.

You might suspect that the hundred or so pages describing Ameisen's self-treatment and public activism on behalf of baclofen would weigh down the book. It doesn't. He is as deft with the medical basis for baclofen's efficacy as he is unsparing in his personal account of alcohol's terrors. On the other hand, readers used to grittier stories of addiction may balk at Ameisen's attempts at self-deprecation: When you're a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur and Elie Wiesel is taking your late-night confessionals, your version of hitting bottom might still be up for everybody else. Even worse is Ameisen's rare but occasional drinking after he has been "cured" of his alcoholism. Surely this will draw questions from many and occasion more than one knowing nod from the unreconstructed junkies who happen upon "The End of My Addiction."

But these are arguably subjective faults and they never eclipse the central narrative. As struggling addicts come to recognize Ameisen's many failures, they may also find themselves advocating right beside him: Baclofen's out-of-patent status will surely require public rather than private funding and its convincingly argued promise is too large to neglect. In recounting his trials, Ameisen notes that "there is scarcely another major illness whose treatment has been static over the last seventy or more years." If the claims made by "The End of My Addiction" are true, Ameisen's story will not only be an engrossing journey from sickness to health, but one of medicine's heroic episodes.

Joel Turnipseed is the author of "The Baghdad Express." He lives in Minneapolis.