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An entertaining, accessible guide to seventy classic self-help texts. Each book is summarised to convey a brief idea of what each one has to offer the interested reader, while a ´Speed Read´ for each book delivers a quick sense of what each writer is like to read and a highly compressed summary of the main points of the book in question.

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From Dale Carnegie´s How to Win Friends and Influence People, published in 1936, which has sold over 30 million copies to date, to the mind management programme of Professor Steve Peters´ The Chimp Paradox, a concise and insightful guide to seventy of the most influential self-help books ever published

An entertaining, accessible companion, for readers of self-help books and sceptics alike. The titles include classics on achieving success, confidence and happiness, mindfulness, how to change your life, self-control, overcoming anxiety and self-esteem issues and stress relief.

The chronological arrangement of the titles reveals the intriguing story of how early self-improvement titles were succeeded by increasingly personality-based, materialistic titles and shows how breakout classics often influenced other titles for decades to come. Each book is summarised to convey a brief idea of what it has to offer the interested reader, while a ´Speed Read´ for each book delivers a quick sense of what each writer is like to read and a highly compressed summary of the main points of the book in question.

This is a work of reference to dip into, that acknowledges that some of the most powerful insights into ourselves can be found in texts that aren´t perceived as being ´self-help´ boo

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Russell, James M.
JAMES M. RUSSELL has a philosophy degree from the University of Cambridge, a post-graduate qualification in critical theory, and has taught at the Open University in the UK. He currently works as director of a media-related business. He is the author of Brief Guides to Philosophical Classics, Spiritual Classics and Business Classics. He lives in north London with his wife, daughter and two cats.

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