Offers humorous insight into the popularity and profitability of the self-help publishing industry, and expresses the authors' opinion of of such best-sellers as Dr. Laura Schlessinger, Norman Vicent Peale, and Leo Buscaglia.

A provocative call to action to value the environment and sustainability over capitalist exploitation.

Samuel Beckett as a guru for business executives? James Joyce as a guide to living a good life? The notion of notoriously experimental authors sharing a shelf with self-help books might seem far-fetched, yet a hidden history of rivalry, influence, and imitation links these two worlds. In The Self-Help Compulsion, Beth Blum reveals the profound entanglement of modern literature and commercial advice from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Blum explores popular reading practices in which people turn to literature in search of practical advice alongside modern writers’ rebukes of such instrumental purposes. As literary authors positioned themselves in opposition to people like Samuel Smiles and Dale Carnegie, readers turned to self-help for the promises of mobility, agency, and practical use that serious literature was reluctant to supply. Blum unearths a series of unlikely cases of the love-hate relationship between serious fiction and commercial advice, from Gustave Flaubert’s mockery of early DIY culture to Dear Abby’s cutting diagnoses of Nathanael West and from Virginia Woolf’s ambivalent polemics against self-improvement to the ways that contemporary global authors such as Mohsin Hamid and Tash Aw explicitly draw on the self-help genre. She also traces the self-help industry’s tendency to popularize, quote, and adapt literary wisdom and considers what it might have to teach today’s university. Offering a new history of self-help’s origins, appeal, and cultural and literary import around the world, this book reveals that self-help’s most valuable secrets are not about getting rich or winning friends but about how and why people read.

How did we get here, America? How did our relationship get so broken? And where do we go now? Starting with the premise that Americans' most important relationship is with their nation, Joel Berg’s second book, America We Need to Talk: A Self-Help Book for the Nation, makes a case for how we must both stop blaming the nation’s problems solely on “the politicians” or “the system” and take personal responsibility to solve them. Written as both a hilarious parody of relationship and self-help books and a deadly serious analysis of the nation's political and economic dysfunction, the book dissects how Donald Trump and other Republicans won over white, working-class voters, and includes a concrete plan to win them back, and well as a broader roadmap for reducing poverty, bolstering the middle class, and powering an overall progressive resurgence. As an acclaimed author, a frequent voice in the national media, and the outspoken CEO of the nonprofit group Hunger Free America, Joel Berg is a respected international leader in the fields of hunger, poverty, food, and US politics. Through his biting critique, clear-headed prescriptions, and amusing charts—this book shows how average Joes and Janes can channel their anger at our hobbled government into concrete actions that will fix our democracy, make our economy work for everyone, and restore our stature in the world as a beacon of freedom, diversity, and hope. The American people are in it for the long haul, and, as in all relationships, both sides must recognize their issues and work together to fix them. This book will do more than offer comfort for sobbing progressives—it will show the path to redemption.

Originally published: Carlsbad, Calif.: Hay House, 2012.

Why doesn't self-help help? Micki McGee explores the demand for self-help & what it tells us about ourselves.

“A funny yet surprisingly nuanced look at the legends and ideas of the self-help industry” (People, 3.5 stars), Promise Land explores the American devotion to self-improvement—even as the author attempts some deeply personal improvements of her own. Raised by a child psychologist who was himself the author of numerous self-help books, as an adult Jessica Lamb-Shapiro found herself both repelled and fascinated by the industry: did all of these books, tapes, weekend seminars, groups, posters, t-shirts, and trinkets really help anybody? Why do some people swear by the power of positive thinking, while others dismiss it as so many empty promises? Promise Land is an irreverent tour through the vast and strange reaches of the world of self-help. In the name of research, Jessica attempted to cure herself of phobias, followed The Rules to meet and date men, walked on hot coals, and even attended a self-help seminar for writers of self-help books. But the more she delved into the history and practice of self-help, the more she realized her interest was much more than academic. Forced into a confrontation with the silent grief that had haunted both her and her father since her mother’s death when she was a baby, she realized that sometimes thinking you know everything about a subject is a way of hiding from yourself the fact that you know nothing at all. “A jaunty, cannily written memoir” (Chicago Tribune), Promise Land is cultural history from “a witty and enjoyably self-aware writer…Jessica Lamb-Shapiro’s talent as a storyteller is undeniable” (The New York Times Book Review).