Self help

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==Some famous self-help books==
 
==Some famous self-help books==
*Barger, Ralph "Sonny", ''Freedom: Credos from the Road'' — how you can achieve and excel by applying the immense wisdom of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club to your life.
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|Barger, Ralph "Sonny"
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|How you can achieve and excel by applying the immense wisdom of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club to your life.
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*Bass, Ellen, and Laura Davis, ''The Courage to Heal'' — about child abuse and [[recovered memory]]; highly controversial and mostly rejected by the scientific community.
 
*Bass, Ellen, and Laura Davis, ''The Courage to Heal'' — about child abuse and [[recovered memory]]; highly controversial and mostly rejected by the scientific community.
 
*Berne, Eric, ''Games People Play'' — 1963 book which popularized [[Transactional Analysis]], an influential concept in 1950s and 1960s psychology which has since fallen out of vogue but remains influential within the self-help market.
 
*Berne, Eric, ''Games People Play'' — 1963 book which popularized [[Transactional Analysis]], an influential concept in 1950s and 1960s psychology which has since fallen out of vogue but remains influential within the self-help market.

Revision as of 22:29, 13 June 2009

If you’re reading it in a book, folks, it ain’t self-help. It’s help.
—George Carlin

Self help is the umbrella term given to a fairly large genre of self-guided instructional materials, particularly that centering around improving one's personal life. Such books cover a vast amount of territory, including psychology, motivation, sex education, fad diets, law, and family issues, though quite a lot of it is only peer-reviewed in the sense that sometimes authors talk to each other while using the urinals or stalls in the publisher's water closet.[1] Many self-help titles are in fact based on very dubious principles drawn more from pop spiritualism than science. It has been suggested that the name is misleading because, as George Carlin put it, "If you're looking for self-help, why would you read a book written by somebody else?" It has also been suggested that people who read these books ought to be killed.[2]

Instructional materials for other subjects — particularly the sort that might also be taught in school — might reasonably be considered self-help as well, though the term is not always used in those cases.

All self-help books peddle two different notions.

  1. That people have the potential to be, have, or do anything they want and
  2. That people need to always be living at their full potential.

In other words, you are always supposed to be a god and if you're not, you suck.

Contents

Some famous self-help books

Title
Author(s) Published Comments

Freedom: Credos from the Road Barger, Ralph "Sonny" How you can achieve and excel by applying the immense wisdom of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club to your life.
  • Bass, Ellen, and Laura Davis, The Courage to Heal — about child abuse and recovered memory; highly controversial and mostly rejected by the scientific community.
  • Berne, Eric, Games People Play — 1963 book which popularized Transactional Analysis, an influential concept in 1950s and 1960s psychology which has since fallen out of vogue but remains influential within the self-help market.
  • Branden, Nathaniel, Honoring the Self - Branden turned to writing self-esteem books after his acrimonious split with Ayn Rand and the objectivist movement
  • Browne, Harry, How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World — self-help through anarcho-capitalism for societal dropouts. Browne later twice ran for president on the Libertarian Party ticket.
  • Canfield, Jack, et al, Chicken Soup for the Soul — and a large series of books which followed.
  • Carlson, Richard, Don't Sweat the Small Stuff (And It's All Small Stuff) — and a large series of books which followed.
  • Carnegie, Dale, How to Win Friends and Influence People — targeted at people with social difficulties and anxieties.[3]
  • Carnegie, Dale, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living
  • Frederick, Carl, EST: Playing the Game the New Way (The Game of Life) — presents the concepts taught in Erhard Seminars Training in book form; the author was sued by Werner Erhard claiming it was an infringement on his intellectual property rights but the suit failed and the book became a best seller in 1975.
  • Harris, Thomas, I'm OK, You're OK — a classic presentation of Transactional Analysis, on the best seller lists for two years in the early 1970s.
  • Hickam, Homer, We Are Not Afraid — Some truly banal positive thinking 'n' go-get-em motivational talk wrapped in teh American flag and "we stand up to bullies after 9/11" BS here, written at about a 6th grade reading level.[4]
  • Hill, Napoleon, Think and Grow Rich — considered a classic on entrepreneurship written during the Great Depression; much of it is about good planning for the future and positive thinking, but it includes the pseudoscientific concept of tapping into "infinite intelligence" and a weird chapter on sexual sublimation.
  • James, Muriel and Jongeward, Dorothy, Born to Win
  • Maltz, Maxwell, Psycho-Cybernetics — despite the esoteric name this is mostly basic goal-setting and developing ones social skills with some Christianity and self-hypnosis mixed in.
  • Newman, Fred, Let's Develop — an attempt to promote Newman's controversial Social Therapy to the self-help market.
  • Peale, Norman Vincent, The Power of Positive Thinking — Probably the first widely distributed book of this type.
  • The Reader's Digest Do-It-Yourself Manual — A classic volume of professional tips and projects.
  • Reed, Scott, The Miracle of Psycho-Command Power — poorly-conceived and frankly ridiculous ripoff of Psycho-Cybernetics and Think and Grow Rich mixed with pseudoscientific information on handwriting analysis and claims to teach you how to control others' actions by staring at them.[5]
  • Schuller, Robert, Possibility Thinking, Be Happy, You Are Loved, and numerous other books — a Christian televangelist's contributions to the self-help market.
  • Sheehy, Gail, Passages — very popular, reasonably "wise", but if the reader is not on the same "life track" as her chapters, it rapidly loses value.

Other books of a touchy-feely nature

  • Alcoholics Anonymous — aka the "Big Book", the basic text of Alcoholics Anonymous.
  • Bach, Richard, Jonathan Livingston Seagullomnipotence through adrenaline junkiehood. Lots of bird photos to inspire the reader.
  • Covey, Stephen, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People — Covey managed to parlay that book into an empire of personal organizers and inspirational material.[6]
  • Johnson, Spencer, The One-Minute Sales Person, The One-Minute Manager, and several other "One-Minute" books — popular among businesspeople.
  • Johnson, Spencer, Who Moved My Cheese? — a rodent parable.
  • Hubbard, L. Ron, Dianetics — later became the basis for a noxious cult.
  • Peters, Tom, In Search of Excellence and Thriving on Chaos — business management books; how to get rich by exploiting the workers taking advantage of globalization and technological change.
  • Schwartz, David, The Magic of Thinking Big — popular among salespeople and business; Amway is fond of promoting this one too.
  • Javiar Ctibor - Shut up and stop whining: How to end your addiction to self help books. Okay, not really, but he is thinking of writing it.

Some generic stuff that needs crystallising

  • Trudeau, Kevin — an ever-growing list of books "they" don't want you to read.

Footnotes

  1. This would better be called "pee-review" - get it?
  2. People who oughta be killed
  3. Wikipedia: How to Win Friends and Influence People is one of the first bestselling self-help books ever published. Written by Dale Carnegie and first published in 1936, it has sold 15 million copies globally. It was a New York Times best seller for 10 years.
  4. Seriously, the author of Rocket Boys (great book BTW) wrote this? It's enough to make one wonder which hack ghost writer wrote this and how did his publisher ever convince Hickam to allow his name on the cover? There is just no way the author of several great books on coal mining and amateur rocketry, and a West-By-God-Virginian to boot, also wrote this. The mind boggles.
  5. If you remember the ads in comic books and supermarket tabloids during the 1970s and 1980s for a book telling you how to draw riches and lovers to you with your magnetic gaze, this was that infamous book. The absolute bottom of the self-help barrel. The hilarious illustrations and terminology the author invents are not to be missed! [1]
  6. FranklinCovey is not to be confused with Franklin Electronic Publishers.
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