Customer Reviews

Self-Help Nation: The Long Overdue, Entirely Justified, Delightfully Hostile Guide to the Snake-Oil Peddlers Who Are Sapping Our Nation's Soul

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"Self-Help Nation" opens with a sad story: The author, Tom Tiede, having once been a bookstore owner, is called to a near-empty house to purchase a personal collection. There are hundreds of books, three-quarters of them self-help, almost all "hardcover, rush-out-and-buy first editions." Mr. Tiede estimates the owner spent $12,000 on these books over a period of four years. This hapless man had lost his business, his wife, and finally his home. Had he put that 12 grand toward mortgage payments he would perhaps at least still have his house. Sadder still was the fact that most of the books had bookmarks lodged only 20 or 30 pages in. Such was the catalyst for Tiede's diatribe against the purveyors of self-help and the suckers who buy their books.

One of Tiede's favorite criticisms of self-help books is that they offer "common sense" advice that most of us have known from infancy. But what looks like common sense to him is news to a lot of people; a lot of us have holes in our upbringings, and weren't taught the value of, say, persistence, hard work, developing a strong will or maintaining a positive attitude. If people can learn these things from a book, that may not be such a bad thing.

Tiede comes off as arrogant, and his book is sure to offend many people. There is good and bad in this book in about equal measure, an odd mixture of spite and compassion. Too bad it's impossible to give 2 1/2 stars. For example, he despises the entire Boom generation, but is keenly sympathetic to women and women's concerns. His overall attitude is that humans are flawed, but so what? Our problems aren't as big as they seem, and anyone who tells you otherwise is just trying to sell you something. So what if we get into bad relationships? We learn from them and move on. It's better than, in the quest for perfection, never having a relationship at all.

In the second half of the book Tiede pauses from taking potshots at easy targets to make some pretty good points. One is that the problems addressed by self-help books are pretty inconsequential next to the "invisible, inescapable evilness" rampant in the world, real problems like chronic hunger; child labor; income inequality ("Fifteen percent of the world's people live in the twenty-two nations where the annual income is above $25,000. For everyone else, the average income is $600 a year"); war and the homelessness and statelessness that result; lack of affordable housing in the U.S.; and the billions of dollars spent on arms each year. This is in the chapter called "God's Help?". Tiede reserves a special scorn for quasi-religious self-help books because, to paraphrase, either God is not minding the store or he's on the wrong side. "For many, religious expectation is a tidy way to mislay personal responsibility....reason and goodness work just as well and they are commodities grown on earth."

Ironically, the most enjoyable sections of the book are when Tiede gives advice of his own. "Like sex? Be grateful, undress, lie down, and practice. Don't like sex? Stop fussing, get a hobby [...] and quit wasting other people's time. Undecided? Undress, lie down, and so on...." He also advises readers to smoke pot! drink up! and get mad once in a while!

If you've never cracked the spine of a self-help tome, this book will only confirm your prejudices. If you're the kind of person that thinks "Chicken Soup" and Dr. Laura books are good readin', your feelings might get hurt. If you're an individual who has read some of the small portion of self-help books out there that are actually helpful, you'll know that they promote the same notions that Tom Tiede advocates: self-reliance, critical thinking, kindness, a sense of humor. Whatever the case, you can probably skip this book.

The world needs a good book calling to task all the charlatans out there getting rich by offering advice on everthing from sex to getting rid of problem dandruff. Unfortunately, Tom Tiede's "Self-Help Nation" is not up to the task. The book is merely a disjointed collection of screeds against everything and everyone ranging from Thomas Jefferson, to Christians to modern newspapers to that always popular target--baby boomers. The book should be entitled, "Tom Tiede's Pet Peeves: a Self-indulgent Monologue." The book's cover promises readers an antidote to the "snake oil peddlers who are sapping our nation's soul." Instead, Tiede simply offers his own brand of snake oil in a package that promises an antidote but contains only colored water.

I wanted to like this book. Who wouldn't, with a title like that? But I couldn't get past the first chapter. It's disorganized, almost incoherent, and just plain unpleasant. There *is* a great book waiting to be written about the potential for charlatanism or just plain bungling in the self-help movement....but this isn't it.

Self-help, when it's taken seriously, can often become a seductive, perplexing, mind-spinning jungle. I've been there and learned the hard way. I agree with most of the other reviewers of this book - this book is well-intentioned, it's raw, it's a sorely needed message, and it doesn't quite finish the job.

There are some parallels to a promising web site I've found, www.LiveReal.com. It's one thing to criticize self-help authors (which is pretty easy to do); it's another thing to offer valid and even better alternatives.

The key ingredient, which LiveReal nails, is that the issues addressed by self-help are intimately linked to keeper issues, and the ways that various issues are interconnected. For example, self-esteem is connected to relationships is connected to spirituality is connected to . . . and so on.

While LiveReal is also pretty rough and raw around the edges, in my mind, it's still the best I've found yet to do the whole job in one place.

This is a ranting, raving critique of the torrent of popular self-help advice books and of the growing swarm of advisors getting rich off the incomplete, oversimplified solutions they dispense. Tom Tiede, veteran journalist, spares no author, dead or alive, in his crusade to wean the world away from bogus helpers and healers. For this we are grateful.

It's about time someone stemmed the tide of publisher's hype, misleading titles, quasi-authorities, talk-show spiel and pure nonsense peddled as fact and honored as life-changing truth. I commend Tiede for taking on the thankless, largely hopeless task of getting through to the spiritually blind and deaf who compose the bulk of humanity. His topics hit home, covering relationships, marriage, addictions, loneliness, obesity, self esteem, alcoholism, sex and more.

Mixing reason with humor, satire, shock and insult Tiede tears down best selling authors, such as Deepak Chopra, Denis Waitley, John Bradshaw, Dr. Laura Schlessinger, Dr. Susan Forward, Terry Cole-Whittaker, Leo Buscaglia and more. Any self-help writer of the last 30 or 40 years is a target for his piercing pen. Then he crosses the line of political correctness into religion, sacred books and saviors.

Sprinkled among the tirades are touches of time-tested wisdom where Tiede urges us to think for ourselves and tackle reality with all its ups and downs, its eternal challenges that will not go away with secret techniques and magic answers. We get the impression that Tiede himself has come through the fog and found fresh air on the other side.

Unfortunataly, his use of four-letter words and vulgarities and his attack on souls considered as holy prophets and great message-bearers will no doubt turn away the very folks who need a wake-up call. Or maybe the language is part of the wake-up. At any rate, I'm thinking this book would work better as stand-up comedy in an off-beat night club, than an invitation to sane thinking for the book-buying masses.

Another problem is that he attempts to explain through logic topics steeped in emotion. Tradition does not yield to common sense and neither does superstition. Sacred cows cannot be argued away. Nor does Tiede recognize the slow, incremental, untraceable, personal changes for the better that may qualify as major victories. Somewhere someone reading the books he decries may have been lifted for a moment or strengthened to step around another scary corner. What more can we ask?

It may take thousands and thousands of books from bad to mediocre to excellent before we respond. It may take years of wresting with a single sentence to get a glimmer of understanding. Patience! Patience!

Finally, it would have been helpful if Tiede had listed all the books with publishing details in a bibliography at the end. Readers could find them easily, test his theories and decide for themselves the merits or flaws of the self-help market.

Lately, I have been weary. After reading "Self-Help Nation", I came to the conclusion that I was tired of being bombared with books that tell me what's wrong with my life and then purport to tell me what I need to do to fix it. For the past 15 years I seem to have been in one big "change your life" blur. Nothing was ever good enough, or even just good. It couldn't be good, it had to be better.
Buddhism, Taoism, A Course In Miracles, Metaphysics, Hypnosis, Tony Robbins, Fit for Life, Self-Talk, Celestine Propehecy, Yoga, Meditation, Creative Visualization; you name it I've purchased and read a book on it.
No wonder I'm tired.
In "Self Help Nation", the author takes a scathingly funny look at the Wayne Dyers, The Deepak Chopras, the Louise Hays, of our world. Sometimes, he states, you just gotta take responsibility for your own life and make it on your own, without any outside help from these self-proclaimed 'experts'.
I would change that to pick a system of belief and stick to it, rather than going on the cafeteria plan and buying any and every book that comes out, hoping to glean yet another morsel from it.
The best part about this book is that it really opens your eyes and gives you a starting point in weaning yourself (and myself) away from the self-help and psychology section of your local bookstore.
The worst part is that the author takes way too many potshots at so many different authors. It's like watching your drunk uncle gripe about everyone in town, rather than giving you the good gossip on the mayor and the city council.
The last two words of this book are Self-reliance.
That's what it's all about. Relying on yourself. Remembering that everything you need to know is inside of you. Anything you want to change you already have the innate knowledge to know how to do it. Want to lose weight? Eat less and exercise more. There, I just saved you $20, so put down that copy of "The Zone".
Dig up a copy of Emerson's "Self-Reliance" and read it. It's free online in a thousand different places.
Then stack up all your self-help books, load them in the trunk of your car and give them to charity.
Or better yet, sell them here on amazon.com to other folks who haven't figured out what self-reliance is yet.

This book is absolute garbage and totally bias. He rants about how bad all these self-help authors are without doing research on the authors themselves and on the people who read self-help books. As in any other field of literature or art, there are good works and bad works. If he would have analyzed authors like Maxwell Maltz, Brian Tracy or Jim Rohn he wouldn't have written this book at all. Moreover, his writing style and arguments are horrible. Please don't buy or read this book. I would suggest to check it out at a library or bookstore if you must read it. If anything, it shows one how not to write a book.

Being a self-help reader, I know there are bogus authors that profess second-rate material and readers who are very self-absorbed, but there are a great number of people who have benefited from self-help. Self-help prevented me from committing suicide and helped me get confident, focused on my goals, manage my time and be relaxed and happy everyday of my life. I admit it did take me awhile to make these changes. I got stuck many times along the way, but I decided never to give up no matter how many times I got frustrated with my life and I am very glad now that I didn't. My advice is to read and apply whatever it is your learning EVERYDAY for at least half an hour until you master it such as goal-setting, meditation/relaxation, working out, changing your attitude/beliefs, relationships, working longer hours, time management, etc. until it becomes second nature and part of your routine.

This book even had the potential as a comedy but Tiede is as dull as Al Gore and he even dares to offer his own idiotic advice. Tiede is just upset because there are people who contiously read self-help books and can't improve their lives. Nobody said self-improvement is easy. It requires a lot of focus and discipline but in the end it is totally worth it. There will always be people who can't learn to improve their lives no matter how many self-help books they read. They are stuck internally and can't grasp the basics of what they read or they forget it too quickly and go back to their old ways. That's all I have to say because I don't want to waste any more time writing about this silly book.

The self-help phenomenon seems to be everywhere: in bookstores, on the radio and television, on audio tapes for our Walkman, the variety and number of these tomes and programs seem endless. And it seems to be a modern phenomena, or is it?

It may surprise a lot of people, Tom Tiede included, that self-help books have been around almost since the printing press was invented. And though it seems as if there is a neverending proliferation of these self-help tomes these days, the twenties and thirties had more than their share -- the most famous self-help book of all, How To Win Friends and Influence People, was written in the thirties. And its spinoff, the Dale Carnegie Institute, still thrives today.

Despite the Oprahization of America, self-help tomes really haven't changed all that much. How could they? The subject is always intrinically the same. No, it's just the angles that have changed, especially with the coming of quantum physics. Many snake oil salesmen have made careers misinterpreting quantum physics through the medium of the self-help tome.

So, given all that's out there these days on television and radio and in the bookstore, an examination of this racket is long overdue. Unfortunately, Tom Tiede is not the person to perform such an examination. Despite a few good examples and hits on the mark (Who could miss such an inviting target as Deepak Chopra?), Tiede falls short both in organization and the necessary ingredient of humor. Where a P. J. O'Rourke comes off with a good dose of sarcastic disbelief, Tiede comes off with more than a touch of bitterness toward his subjects, as if they really are to be taken with the utmost seriousness.

This is what ultimately does the book in. There are too many screeds and not enough satire. It's like reading the Skeptical Inquirer. Where is the laughter? If you really want to read this book, then I suggest you local library, and if you simply must buy a copy (and I know many of you are scannig these reviews looking for justification), then wait until it comes out in paperback, where your financial expense won't be as great, although you will have to accept less when you put sell it to the used book vendor.

The book opens with a telling tale. The author is being asked to buy a used book collection, filled mostly with self-help volumes with the dust jackets inserted in the first 20-30 pages. Why are $12,000 worth of books at retail available? Well, the original owner has had financial, health, and marital setbacks (of the sort the self-help books are supposed to assist you in avoiding) that meant that he has lost everything. The current seller muses that the man might still own his home if he had used the $12,000 to pay against his mortgage instead.

At the broadest level, this book challenges the notion that best-selling self-help books help anyone with anything. That is the best part of the book. The book's weakness is that the author's views will not necessarily coincide with your own experiences in getting help from books. Mr. Tiede's snake-oil salesperson may be one of you favorite authors. His main method of critiquing the works is the find the biggest platitudes in a book, and then to quote them at length. It gets a little boring. He also finds something not to like about everyone (Thomas Jefferson gets as hard a hard shot for his slave holdings as bad writers do for not saying anything useful).

I think a more interesting approach would have been to survey people who buy and read self-help books to find out what actually goes on (a sort of Self-Helper Next Door).

Now some of the claims are pretty funny on their face. One book tells you to use a very good lubricant because orgasms can be prolonged for 30-60 minutes.

Some of the gurus don't seem to practice what they preach, or don't have the life experiences to advise others.

The first and last chapters are the best. I found the chapters and baby boomers, toxic intimidation, addiction, and religion to be pretty uninteresting. Read a few pages before you commit to a whole chapter in those sections.

"The fix-everything authors are right about one thing: we do need help." "I urge you to go to the forest for succor instead of the bookshop." Basically, his point is that self-reliance is key. Books cannot take action for you. In fact, you probably already know what you need to do, so the books just waste time and resources . . . and help you procrastinate.

After you read this book, I suggest that you think back to what you did after reading each self-help book you have used. What improved? From that test, you will be able to focus on the authors and subjects where you have found the connection to authors helpful. In doing this you can protect yourself from "an insatiable hunger to believe anything is possible."

Be open to learning from others and by taking your own actions.

I do hope that someone will write a better version of this book that focuses on the reader's perspective rather than the author's.

One of my favorite books written by the delightfully honest Tom Tiede. A thought provoking book that leaves no stone unturned and no sacred cows untouched. If all those self-help books sitting on your shelf haven't made you life better give this book a try. At least he won't try to sell you any snake oil just good common sense. As a matter of fact he's still dispensing advice and insight at his website.... www.whithereudaimonia.com and his Facebook page for Whither Eudaimonia.