SHAM: how the self-help movement made America helpless

✍ Scribed by Steve Salerno

• Book ID: 100661860
• Publisher: Crown/Archetype; Crown Publishers
• Year: 2005
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 191 KB
• Edition: 1st ed
• Category: Fiction
• City: New York
• ISBN: 0307238652

✦ Synopsis

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 expose 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...

✦ Subjects

PSYCHOLOGY -- General