From The Science of Self Help in the New Atlantis:
It is easy to dismiss the self-help literature as a money-making machine for writer tycoons; so much of it obviously is. But studying self-help seriously not only illuminates the American character but may actually turn up some needed wisdom. So I have explored, gingerly, as one does a cracked tooth, three facets of the self-help genre: first, the self-conscious wisdom literature exemplified by the work of Dr. Wayne W. Dyer, the Sage of Maui, self-described student of American philosophic genius, who has composed a 390-page commentary on Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, and who presents a two-hour disquisition with ten bullet points on your PBS station every time there is a pledge drive; second, the positive psychology movement, which disdains the self-help label and claims to be unfolding “a science of happiness,” and whose vanguard spokesman is Tal Ben-Shahar, an Israeli-born international consultant, lecturer, and writer who was until recently a professor at Harvard, his course informally known as Happiness 101 the most popular at the university; and the achievement masters, who are a sterner lot in general than most self-help boys and girls, and whose eyes burn bright with the latest discoveries in the forging of excellence from quite commonplace human material.
Interesting essay.
