I confess: I adore self-help books and wherever there is a self-help book I must read it. I love the idea of an author thinking that he/she has in his/her mind the proper recipe for my problems and the ones of my readers. They're books I read with joy and attention because there is inside a mixture of psychology and good proposals. Some of them pass through Christian prayers, the presence of God.
So, when I noticed this book by Columbia, The Self-Help Compulsion Searching for Advice in Modern
His How to Win Friends and Influence People was one of the best books of that times while authors like Lenny Bruce and Toby Young published first parodies in How to Talk Dirty and Influence People and How to Lose Friends and Alienate People. You musn't be surprised. Once published The Lord of the Rings by Tolkien the Harvard Lampoon published The Bored of the Rings.
In the case of Carnegie, no one felt that he was a serious author because he did want to change the path of literature and the reasons why it was born: for presenting beauty in the world.
The proposal of Carnegie passed more practically through a biggest involvement of all social classes, including the working-class, so that everyone could have a word of comfort and could search for proper answers, escaping the most common problems thanks to that book.
Self-help books are not just books for our soul, no. Most of them pretend of letting us understand much better also modernists authors like James Joyce; these authors were not accessible to everyone and maybe they needed to be "revealed" much more to the so-called common reader.
A writer doesn't mind if he is understood; he doesn't write in function of being understood by his/her readers, and Joyce was not the only hermeneutic writer known around.
Writers didn't see with positivity the arrival of self-help books because they distracted potential readers, that maybe would have neglected and snobbed their books for these ones.
You musn't never think that self-help books were born with Carnegie. They have always existed! Till the ancient Rome. A symbol was Cicero with his De Officiis.
Self-help books meant also the understanding of nature, seasons, thanks to modern Almanacs plenty o jokes, recipes, events, curiosities.
Not only but self-help books tried to read the various big authors as saviors of the rest of the humanity. So you musn't be surprised if someone wrote: "How Proust can Change your Life."
Self-help books with the time became influentials: they started to influence the same literature embracing at the same time every possible field: from science to sociology.
More recently, we can read, as wrote the New Yorker Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert as a self-help book because of the traumatic experience and changes wanting by the same writer of this book. After all every woman can experience that state of mind sorting out problems in creative ways.
Isn't is Eat, Pray, Love a modality for re-discover the self and our centrality as women in the society?
Self-help books were and are for everyone because they embrace all the possible fields of knowledge. Some African pamphlets published by a Nigerian's publishing house, the Onitsha Market included also Hard to Get but Easy to Spend and also How to Start Life and End it Well (sounds great!) and How to Live Better Life and Help Yourself.
Of course different societies has had their own gurus or people who reached the heart of people.
In modern times John Gray has experienced a big success with his Men are from Mars, Women from Venus. This self-help book like other ones has been translated in Chinese as well! because independently where we live in, everyone search for happiness or good advice for a best life or for understanding better his/her partner.
The same Flaubert in his latest book Bouvard et Pecuchet published in 1881 approaches the self-help element. The story is the one of two men who inherited a large fortune leaving Paris and their work for moving in a country enjoying full time their hobbies. Self-help, gratification, living a good existence doing what a person love to do start to enter in the mind of readers but mainly in the ones of writers. It's a crucial point this one.
Not everyone was happy of a novelty like this one was.
Someone wrote: "There is no longer an office of the mind, but an office of recipes; the products of thought are priced like merchandise in a boutique."
In modern time, and with more than a touch of religiosity I signal to all of you Reverend Norman Vincent Peale, founder of Guideposts who, in recent decades wrote The Power of Positive Thinking, that I guess is in all our shelves.
There is not just Peale. If your dream is to become rich why not reading Hamid's novel: How to Get Filthy Rich?
Self-help books during the Victorian Age became powerful tools, books of great importance for keeping people informed or more learned than what they were, in particular if members of the working class so with less possibility of enlarging cultural skills.
Beautiful book, informative and extremely interesting.
I love the cover too. It says everything and it's friendly.
Highly recommended.
I thank Columbia University Press for the physical copy of this book.
Anna Maria Polidori
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