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THE SELF-HELP COMPULSION

Name: THE SELF-HELP COMPULSION
Author: Beth Blum
ISBN: 978-0-231-19492-1

SEARCHING FOR ADVICE IN MODERN LITERATURE

by Beth Blum ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 28, 2020

A deep scholarly probe into self-help’s inextricable influence on the history and future of literature.

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Blum (English/Harvard Univ.) argues that a literary perspective offers crucial insight into the ongoing appeal and evolution of modern advice books.

In this erudite volume, the author suggests that “self-help’s most valuable secrets are not about getting rich or winning friends but about how and why people read.” The genre has operated “as an alternative pedagogic space to the academy—one whose breezy, instrumental reading methods contrasted with the close, disinterested paradigms” of the university setting. Self-help has a long history—as Blum notes, “what is…Ovid’s Ars Amatoria but an ancient Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus?”—and it offers a reminder of the promises of transformation, agency, culture, and wisdom that draw readers to books. Moreover, there is the issue of self-help’s “overlooked embroilment in speculation, imagination, the fantastical, and counterfactual.” In exploring both the history of self-help books and their continued rampant popularity, Blum often wades through thickets of academese—“the self-help hermeneutic binds in unexpected ways a nonsynchronous, cross-cultural community of practical readers”—to get to a point. But the points are well taken. Self-help books have a history of being promoted as antidotes to intellectual bombast and aesthetic idealism, whereas serious literature has railed against instrumental pedantry. However, that doesn’t have to be the case. Indeed, self-help can display emancipatory potential and tap “a progressive, even radical, agenda.” Blum offers close analyses of selected works of a wide variety of authors—including Flann O’Brien, Edith Wharton, Henry James, and Virginia Woolf—to discover “the troubling affinities between charismatic literary authorship and the spiritual manipulation of popular guides.” She uncovers the influence of early self-help on the literature of James Joyce—the modernist critique of instrumentalism is a thread through the book—finds interesting parallels in the work of Samuel Beckett and Timothy Ferriss, and examines how modern fictional works use “self-help as an opportunity to modernize a potentially maudlin textual ethics.”

A deep scholarly probe into self-help’s inextricable influence on the history and future of literature.

Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-231-19492-1

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Columbia Univ.

Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

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NUTCRACKER

by E.T.A. Hoffmann ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 28, 1996

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This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)

Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996

ISBN: 0-15-100227-4

Page Count: 136

Publisher: Harcourt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE NUTCRACKER AND THE MOUSE KING
by E.T.A. Hoffmann ; adapted by Natalie Andrewson ; illustrated by Natalie Andrewson

- BOOK REVIEW
THE NUTCRACKER
by E.T.A. Hoffmann & illustrated by Julie Paschkis

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TO THE ONE I LOVE THE BEST

EPISODES FROM THE LIFE OF LADY MENDL (ELSIE DE WOLFE)

by Ludwig Bemelmans ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 23, 1955

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An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.