Community hub
Recent from talks
Contribute something to knowledge base
Content stats: 0 posts, 0 articles, 0 media, 0 notes
Members stats: 0 subscribers, 0 contributors, 0 moderators, 0 supporters
Subscribers
Supporters
Contributors
Moderators
Hub AI
Self-help book AI simulator
(@Self-help book_simulator)
Hub AI
Self-help book AI simulator
(@Self-help book_simulator)
Self-help book
A self-help book is a book or text that is written with the intention to instruct its readers how to solve their personal problems. They take their name from Self-Help, an 1859 best-selling book by Samuel Smiles, but are sometimes known and classified as "self-improvement" books and media. Self-help books moved from a position in a niche market to much wider adoption and use in the late twentieth century.
Self-help books include diverse topics, but often include concepts and theories in the real, of popular psychology. Some well-known examples in this genre include Atomic Habits by James Clear and Man's Search For Meaning by Viktor E Frankl. All self books intend to assist the reader. The book 50 Self-Help Classics by Tom Butler-Bowdon is a survey of the self-help literature from Samuel Smiles to Brene Brown. Many celebrities have also marketed self-help books including Jennifer Love Hewitt, Oprah Winfrey, Elizabeth Taylor, Charlie Fitzmaurice, Tony Robbins, Wayne Dyer, Deepak Chopra and Cher. Like most books, self-help books can be purchased both offline and online; 'between 1972 and 2000, the numbers of self-help books...increased from 1.1 percent to 2.4 percent of the total number of books in print'.
Informal and formal guides to everyday behaviour have existed since the Bronze age, if not before. Ancient Egyptian "Codes" of conduct "have a curiously modern note: 'You trail from street to street, smelling of beer...like a broken rudder, good for nothing....you have been found performing acrobatics on a wall!'". Micki McGee writes: "Some social observers have suggested that the Bible is perhaps the first and most significant of self-help books".
In classical Rome, Cicero's On Friendship and On Duties became "handbooks and guides" for Roman readers, and Ovid wrote both the Art of Love and Remedy of Love. The former has been described as dealing "with practical problems of everyday life: where to go to meet girls, how to start a conversation with them, how to keep them interested, and...how to be sociable rather than athletic in bed"; the latter has been described as containing "a series of instructions, as frank as they are ingenious and brilliantly expressed, on falling out of love".
Some scholars of the Islamic Golden Age also wrote books that could be categorized as self-help books. One prominent example is Al-Ghazali who wrote Ay farzand (O son!): a short book of counsel that al-Ghazali wrote for one of his students. Another is Disciplining the Soul, which is one of the key sections of The Revival of the Religious Sciences.
During the European Renaissance, a line of descent may be traced back from Smiles' Self-Help to "the Renaissance concern with self-fashioning" which "produced a flood of educational and self-help materials": The Florentine Giovanni della Casa in a 1558 book of manners published suggests "It is also an unpleasant habit to lift another person's wine or his food to your nose and smell it". The Middle Ages saw the genre personified in "Conduir-amour" ("guide in love matters").
In or around the 1960s, self-help book has jumped to cultural prominence, a fact admitted by both advocates critics of the self-improvement genre. Some would 'view the buying of such books...as an exercise in self-education'. Others, more critical, still concede that 'it is too prevalent and powerful a phenomenon to overlook, despite belonging to "pop" culture'.
Where traditional psychology and psychotherapy texts tend to be written in an impersonal, objective mode, many self-help books 'involve a first-person involvement and often a conversion experience' with their prose. In a tone similar to the self-help support groups from which many examples often draw, horizontal peer-support and validation is thus offered the reader through its tone as well as support from the author.
Self-help book
A self-help book is a book or text that is written with the intention to instruct its readers how to solve their personal problems. They take their name from Self-Help, an 1859 best-selling book by Samuel Smiles, but are sometimes known and classified as "self-improvement" books and media. Self-help books moved from a position in a niche market to much wider adoption and use in the late twentieth century.
Self-help books include diverse topics, but often include concepts and theories in the real, of popular psychology. Some well-known examples in this genre include Atomic Habits by James Clear and Man's Search For Meaning by Viktor E Frankl. All self books intend to assist the reader. The book 50 Self-Help Classics by Tom Butler-Bowdon is a survey of the self-help literature from Samuel Smiles to Brene Brown. Many celebrities have also marketed self-help books including Jennifer Love Hewitt, Oprah Winfrey, Elizabeth Taylor, Charlie Fitzmaurice, Tony Robbins, Wayne Dyer, Deepak Chopra and Cher. Like most books, self-help books can be purchased both offline and online; 'between 1972 and 2000, the numbers of self-help books...increased from 1.1 percent to 2.4 percent of the total number of books in print'.
Informal and formal guides to everyday behaviour have existed since the Bronze age, if not before. Ancient Egyptian "Codes" of conduct "have a curiously modern note: 'You trail from street to street, smelling of beer...like a broken rudder, good for nothing....you have been found performing acrobatics on a wall!'". Micki McGee writes: "Some social observers have suggested that the Bible is perhaps the first and most significant of self-help books".
In classical Rome, Cicero's On Friendship and On Duties became "handbooks and guides" for Roman readers, and Ovid wrote both the Art of Love and Remedy of Love. The former has been described as dealing "with practical problems of everyday life: where to go to meet girls, how to start a conversation with them, how to keep them interested, and...how to be sociable rather than athletic in bed"; the latter has been described as containing "a series of instructions, as frank as they are ingenious and brilliantly expressed, on falling out of love".
Some scholars of the Islamic Golden Age also wrote books that could be categorized as self-help books. One prominent example is Al-Ghazali who wrote Ay farzand (O son!): a short book of counsel that al-Ghazali wrote for one of his students. Another is Disciplining the Soul, which is one of the key sections of The Revival of the Religious Sciences.
During the European Renaissance, a line of descent may be traced back from Smiles' Self-Help to "the Renaissance concern with self-fashioning" which "produced a flood of educational and self-help materials": The Florentine Giovanni della Casa in a 1558 book of manners published suggests "It is also an unpleasant habit to lift another person's wine or his food to your nose and smell it". The Middle Ages saw the genre personified in "Conduir-amour" ("guide in love matters").
In or around the 1960s, self-help book has jumped to cultural prominence, a fact admitted by both advocates critics of the self-improvement genre. Some would 'view the buying of such books...as an exercise in self-education'. Others, more critical, still concede that 'it is too prevalent and powerful a phenomenon to overlook, despite belonging to "pop" culture'.
Where traditional psychology and psychotherapy texts tend to be written in an impersonal, objective mode, many self-help books 'involve a first-person involvement and often a conversion experience' with their prose. In a tone similar to the self-help support groups from which many examples often draw, horizontal peer-support and validation is thus offered the reader through its tone as well as support from the author.