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How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless
by Steve SalernoSHAM shows how thinly credentialed "experts" now dispense advice on everything from mental health to relationships to diet to personal finance to business strategy. Americans spend upward of $8 billion every year on self-help programs and products. And those staggering financial costs are actually the least of our worries.
Self-help: To millions of Americans it seems like a godsend. To many others it
seems like a joke. But as investigative reporter Steve Salerno reveals in this
groundbreaking book, it's neither—in fact it's much worse than a joke. Going
deep inside the Self-Help and Actualization Movement (fittingly, the words form
the acronym SHAM), Salerno offers the first serious exposé of this
multibillion-dollar industry and the real damage it is doing—not just to its
paying customers, but to all of American society.
Based on the author's extensive reporting—and the inside look at the industry he
got while working at a leading "lifestyle" publisher—SHAM shows how
thinly credentialed "experts" now dispense advice on everything from mental
health to relationships to diet to personal finance to business strategy.
Americans spend upward of $8 billion every year on self-help programs and
products. And those staggering financial costs are actually the least of our
worries.
SHAM demonstrates how the self-help movement's core philosophies have
infected virtually every aspect of American life—the home, the workplace, the
schools, and more. And Salerno exposes the downside of being uplifted, showing
how the "empowering" message that dominates self-help today proves just as
damaging as the blame-shifting rhetoric of self-help's "Recovery" movement.
SHAM also reveals:
As Salerno shows, to describe self-help as a waste of time and money vastly understates its collateral damage. And with SHAM, the self-help industry has finally been called to account for the damage it has done.
Whatever you think of self-help products, I encourage you to take a few minutes out of your day to read an excerpt from this controversial book!..continued
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(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
The USA spends about $8 billion a year on self-help programs and products. To put this in context, according to Photius.com, out of 231 countries in the world, 85 of them have GDPs of less than $8 billion. In other words, if 'Self-Help USA' was a country it would rank 140th in the world! Add in diet products and the ranking would move up to the mid-60s!
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He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the more refined art of skipping and skimming
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