Word: self-help
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With so many affluent, culturally aware parents busy parenting, it's no wonder authors have been busy authoring, cashing in with truckloads of books about you and your child. The trend has even touched the fluffiest genre of nonfiction, the self-help book. Commercially, the match is a natural; intellectually, it's problematic. A self-help book about child rearing is almost an oxymoron. Self-help literature, as the name implies, proceeds from a claustrophobic obsession with self--how to improve the self, how to make the self feel better about itself and, pre-eminently, how to make the self...
Intellectual contradictions have never stopped the self-help gurus in the past, of course. And so three of them are publishing new books to apply their wisdom to the untidy art of being a mom and a dad. The titles give the game away. These books are franchise extenders--knockoffs from a successful product line. Elaine St. James, author of last year's Simplify Your Life, now tells us to Simplify Your Life with Kids (Andrews McMeel Publishing; $14.95). Stephen Covey, who has lobotomized a generation of business executives with The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, offers...
Truly manly men do not dance. Howard Brackett knows this is so; he just heard it from a stern voice on a self-help tape. Yet Howard, a respectable English teacher in idyllic Greenleaf, Ind., can't stop the music in his feet. On the disco dance floor of his living room, Howard is the star, with supercool terping that recalls Travolta, Tommy Tune and a little Ann Miller. A dance solo like this is the stuff star careers are made of. Kevin Kline may never reach Cruisean heights, but this old boy can still bust a move...
Because there is so much self-help mush out there, journalists like me see authors like Ban Breathnach wearing a KICK ME sign. When I come to visit, she takes her own advice and snatches a small pleasure out of a potentially prickly situation: she fixes us iced tea and scones. Sitting in the living room of her comfortable brick house in a middle-class Washington suburb without a touch of wretched excess from her newfound wealth, she readily agrees to show me where she writes her first drafts, even though it's in bed. And anticipating my next line...
...politician as deft as Clinton should know that Americans are suckers for a sincere apology. I'm surprised that some self-help huckster hasn't written Apologizing Your Way to the Top. As Murray riffs in A Thousand Clowns, "If you went up to people on the street and offered them money, they'd refuse it. But everybody accepts apology immediately. It's the most negotiable currency." But Gresham's law also applies here: Debased sentiments drive out genuine remorse...