Common Sense Doesn’t Come Cheap

You don’t need me to tell you that self-help books are a significant chunk of today’s publishing market; out of the $8.5 billion spent on self-help in 2003, publishers saw about $640 million. Which makes the genre, according to a Michael Shermer article for Scientific American, one heck of a lucrative SHAM. That’s “Self-Help And Actualization,” and Shermer didn’t invent the term, but he’s happy to give the credit to investigative reporter Steve Salerno, who coined the acronym for last year’s SHAM: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless. In fact, apart from a quick denunciation of self-help’s commercial and psychological exploitation of “the dualism of victimization and empowerment,” the Shermer piece is pretty much just a pointer to Salerno’s book; you’d be hard pressed, really, to even call it a review. And that’s fine, because Salerno’s argument deserves the attention. But, times being what they are, his intellectual crusade isn’t confined to print: SHAMblog is up and running, and he’s taking his best shots at Tony Robbins, Dr. Phil, and Mr. T. That’s right, Mr. T.

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