“Relevance” or “Reason” – That seems to be
the theme running through Tom Tiede’s book, Self-Help Nation.
The volume has quite the sub-title: “The Long Overdue, Entirely
Justified, Diligently Hostile Guide to the Snake-Oil Peddlers
Who Are Sapping Our Nation’s Soul.” Both the theme and the
subtitle deserve a word of explanation. The terms “Relevance”
or “Reason” are used in a slightly unusual way. The
former is used as “applicable to a given felt need”
and the latter as “self-reliance.” Tiede
uses the latter to dismiss just about all self-help methods, but
not unreasonably so.

Tiede, a former journalist, foreign and war correspondent, and
publisher of a newspaper takes on the huge cottage and publishing
industry of ‘self-help’ books. He writes as a self-confessed cynic
who is hostile to most everything you can purchase in any bookstore
in the above-mentioned category. His sub-title is correct on at
least two of its three claims. The book is entirely overdue. The
‘self-help’ section can be so enormous that one scarcely knows
where to spend one’s money. (A point the Tiede demonstrates just
by the breadth of his review.)

In ten short chapters, he categorizes and gives the gist of many
self-help writers and their books. His research in the area is
vast; his disgust at their easy solutions and transparent pap
is evident. Admittedly hostile to most of their claims, as his
sub-title claims them to be ‘snake-oil peddlers.’ He gets to the
heart of their claims and usually punctures their balloon with
wit and insight. He reserves his best for the first and last chapters
where he takes on the like of Dr. Laura Schlessinger, M. Scott
Peck, and the Boy Scouts. Most controversial, I think, is his
willingness to take on sacred cows of our society such as the
young urban African-American masculine culture, the TV-Movie-Entertainment
nexus, and at times the woman’s movement.

Tiede punctuates his raving with his own poetry. This is of uneven
quality, but always serves to touch the emotional side of his
argument. His survey tends to leave the reader wondering what
he would put in the place of the ‘self-help’ books he attacks,
or in fact, if anything needs to replace them.

He ends each chapter with “Afterwords” which often reflect
his prescriptions on a specific issue. At times these function
as a ‘self-help’ prescription of his own. These are the most interesting
aspects of the book, often containing somewhat eclectic and personal
reminiscences and thoughts. A much more interesting form of biography
than usually practiced. We can glean bits and pieces of Tiede’s
life experience without being weighed down with the detail of
ad nauseam memories.

The language used strikes me as language of a broadcaster. It
is not as much language written to be read, as it is to be heard.
Many of the paragraphs have more humor and pointedness when they
are read aloud. This could be a major problem, but is delightful
when one gets used to it. It is as if this book is a text of monologues,
but this time with all the strange grammatical constructions and
rhetorical devices left in.

By virtue of his cynicism most of the authors and persons he makes
reference to are referred to in the negative (Mother Teresa gets
good marks here, but Pat Robertson is held up as a “money
grasping con.”) Indeed, his contention that the self-help
enterprise is “sapping our nation’s soul” is clearly
a value judgment that Tiede makes; you can make your own mind
up in an informed way. This book strikes me as an admittedly polemical,
but fair if humorous survey of the field. The authors touched
on would disagree, but they have to make their dollar as well.




© 2001 Robert N. Terry

Rev. Dr. Robert N. Terry,
D. Min., is a United Church of Christ clergyman. For fifteen years,
he served as a pastor of a church on Long Island. Currently, he
is the Registrar for the Suffolk Association of the U.C.C. He
makes his home in Stony Brook, NY.

This review first appeared online Sept 1, 2001

Categories: SelfHelp, General