A deep scholarly probe into self-help’s inextricable influence on the history and future of literature.
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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