Promise Land by Jessica Lamb-Shapiro

Published by Simon & Schuster on January 7, 2014

Once the exclusive province of books, the self-help industry has expanded to seminars, coaches, facilitators, and other enterprises (some resembling Ponzi schemes) that are dedicated to charging fees in exchange for telling people how to achieve goals or live better lives. You can even email questions to self-help advisers who will answer them for a fee. Although it doesn't seem like "self" help if you are paying a coach to tell you what to do, the industry will happily teach you how to self-help your way to romance, popularity, self-esteem, emotional wellness, satisfying sex, good health, a higher income, a more pleasing body shape, well-behaved children, and pretty much anything else you think you need.

Self-help is nothing new. As Jessica Lamb-Shapiro reminds us, Emerson and Ben Franklin provided the kind of advice that is now regarded as self-help. Thomas Jefferson and Thoreau stressed the power of positive thinking. "Success literature" (covering everything from etiquette to proper diet) thrived during the Victorian era and Samuel Smiles' 1859 self-improvement guide, Self-Help, was hugely popular.

The one-size-fits-all advice that self-help books dispense tends to be superficial, if not glib, in denial of the idiosyncratic diversity of human existence. They are filled with advice that is contradictory and flat-out wrong. They encourage unrealistic expectations (no matter how much you want to achieve a goal, some goals are unattainable unless you have talent). They are based on specious theories -- e.g., "the law of attraction": if you think really really hard about something you want, it will come to you -- that are wholly unsupported by evidence or rationality.

Still, there may be (largely hidden) value in something like "the law of attraction," to the extent that it encourages people to focus their thoughts and to understand their desires. There can, in fact, be value in just about anything if you're willing to dig for it. If a self-help book helps you overcome a fear or gain confidence or think about your problems in a new way, perhaps you found the self-help book that is right for you (while understanding that not all of them will be).

As Lamb-Shapiro points out, some people swear by the wisdom they derive from self-help dispensers while others dismiss self-help as, at best, harmless but lame pop psychology or, at worst, unethical and potentially harmful. Maybe the people who thrive on self-help books need a lot of help or maybe they just enjoy (and benefit from) the inspirational stories that are the backbone of the self-help industry. Lamb-Shapiro brings a tone of playful objectivity to her exploration of the self-help industry, concluding that it fills a national need even if individual self-help practitioners can be "flaky, inarticulate, and deceptive."

The book's weakness is its failure to develop a defining theme. At times, it seems to be intended as a humorous dissection of the self-help industry (surely an easy target) but if that was the goal, it isn't funny enough to succeed. At times, it seems intended as a serious analysis of self-help and it does deliver insight, as in her comparison of serious thought (C.S. Lewis' A Grief Observed) to self-help fluff (Grieving For Dummies),  but it lacks the intellectual heft and clear organization that scholarship demands. Although subtitled "A Memoir," Promise Land meanders aimlessly from one topic to another and only occasionally touches on Lamb-Shapiro's relationship to father, a psychologist who developed and sold dull, noncompetitive family games that were a form of self-help but who avoided talking to Lamb-Shapiro about her mother's suicide. If Promise Land is meant to be a memoir, it tells us very little about the author's life.  Lamb-Shapiro does manage to present a balanced if scattered overview of the self-help industry that is neither laudatory nor condemnatory, but a stronger and more purposeful focus would have made Promise Land a better book.

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