By Steve Salerno

Sham is a no-holds-barred look at a phenomenon that’s at the center of the devolution of today’s American attitudes and values. In this important work, Author Steve Salerno will show how, far from just having an impact on individual disciples, the self-help movement’s unproven rhetoric has found its way into a variety of contemporary institutions, including politics, academics, health care, corporate life, and even sports.

Many of these so-called philosophies (collectively the “Self-Help and Actualization Movement, or SHAM”) have been embraced into the social mainstream. The book exposes how SHAM has created its own class of perpetual victims: people for whom self-help is as addicting, and as much of a detour on the road to a productive life, as alcoholism, chronic infidelity, compulsiveness, “codependency,” or the other hang-ups that typically drive one to seek SHAM enlightenment in the first place.

Sham: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless Steve Salerno. Crown, $24.95 (272 p.)
ISBN 1-4000-5409-5

You! Yes, you! Are you addicted to self-help books? Do you require “empowerment” to reverse your “victimhood”? If so, relax—you’re far from alone. The Self-Help and Actualization Movement (the titular SHAM) is, according to Salerno, an $8-billion-a-year industry that depends on legions of repeat customers. Salerno presents a carefully researched—and devastating—exposé on Sham’s predatory and fraudulent practices and its corrosive effects on society. As former Editor of Men’s Health magazine’s books program, Salerno knows the terrain from the inside. With judicious delight, he exposes the grandiloquent bluster and blithe hypocrisy of Dr. Phil (who, psychologists say, shames rather than helps his guests) and Dr. Laura (the preacher of family values who didn’t know when her own mother was murdered), among many others. He cites examples of junk science, such as Tony Robbins’s talk of “the energy frequency of foods,” and charges that untested alternative medicine draws people away from proven medical treatments. In addition to detailing the raw facts, Salerno excels at pinpointing the self-abnegating strategy the self-help industry employs: namely, tearing you down in the name of building you up. And the positivity yields questionable results in any case. The self-help industry should not be dismissed as “silly but benign,” says Salerno, and he documents how it has undermined psychology, education and health care in this blistering critique. (June 28)

— Publishers Weekly