The former has been described as "the best sex book, as valid for San Francisco and London as for ancient Rome", 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";[5] 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".
[9] It is however since the 1960s or so that the humble self-help book has jumped to cultural prominence, a fact admitted by both the advocates and the critics – often highly polarised – of the self-improvement genre.
The first is the eclipse of the informal, communitarian transmission of folkways and folk wisdom: 'the charge that when self-help writers are being simplistic and repetitious, they are also being banal and unoriginal, merely offering their readers platitudes...on behalf of the best parts of folk wisdom',[17] may simply be because they are providing a formal conduit for the conveyance of such "home truths" in an increasingly unstructured and anomic world.
The other result of the loss of 'Weber's "traditional behavior...everyday action to which people have become habitually accustomed"'[18] is an increased social pressure for Self-fashioning: 'while one's identity might have been formerly anchored in (and limited by) a community...the self-creating self must create a written narrative of his or her life'.
The danger may arise however of an overestimation of the possibilities of change, given that 'we do not in any meaningful sense intend or choose our birth, our parents, our bodies, our language, our culture, our thoughts, our dreams, our desires, our death, and so on'.
[21] In the PsyBlog-Understand Your Mind , Dr. Jeremy Dean states that "the dark side of hope is that claims about potential improvement can, and are, grossly exaggerated, in order to prise open our wallets.
Many celebrities have marketed self-help books including Jennifer Love Hewitt, Oprah Winfrey, Elizabeth Taylor, Charlie Fitzmaurice, Tony Robbins, Wayne Dyer, Deepak Chopra and Cher.
[32] Stephen Potter's "Upmanship" books are satirical takes on status-seeking under the cloak of sociableness – 'remember, that it is just on such occasions that an appearance of geniality is most important'[33] – cast in advice-book form.
A few decades later, with the neoliberal turn, such advice – 'Remember the reality of self-interest'[34] – would be being seriously advocated in the self-help world: in bestsellers like Swim with the Sharks, all 'kinds of seemingly benign guile are encouraged', on the principle that 'status displays matter: just don't be suckered by them yourself'.
[39] In the BookWorld Companion, it is suggested that 'those of you who have tired of the glitzy world of shopping and inappropriate boyfriends in Chicklit, a trip to Dubious Lifestyle Advice might be the next step.