I’ll go with the low-hanging fruit: Mein Kampf. I’ve read it, cover to cover. As a piece of propaganda, it’s good. As an example of good writing? Absolutely not (though I will admit I have only read it in translation). Oh, and the whole fascist, racist, and generally shitty worldview of the author that he infuses into the text. And the fact that the author is literally Hitler. You 5-star that book? You’re a Nazi. Period. And as a Jewish person, I don’t look too kindly on them.
Any self-help book full stop. Even the OG “How to Win Friends and Influence People” while objectively good, also teaches you to be a two-faced insincere narcissist.
Most self-help books are just buzzword after buzzword with no backing apart from shitty anecdotal evidence written by already rich people who use their name to get easy top-selling books.
Some are actually good, but I feel like most of them are completely useless. There are some exceptions though. The 48 laws of power seems pretty okay when I read it. “Men’s search for meaning”, if you can qualify it as self help is amazing
I’d much rather people read a lot of good history books, you can usually learn a lot more from them.
cant be teached but they are naturally attracted to them
No big deal but the past tense of teach is “taught”.
I feel like the good self-help books aren’t marketed as such. Behavioral science and similar fields have a lot to teach us about ourselves, but the information doesn’t come packaged as some easy how-to guide for a better life.
You would really judge someone for using a book to say…quit smoking?
I thought the book was more to help insincere narcissist be more tolerable.
i was always under the impression that it was to keep unemployed men from killing themselves/riding the rails during the great depression by assurinf them they could get a job through being positive and friendly. i dont remember if it went any better than now when older relatives tell job seekers now to just go in and ask for a job.
The book came out 15 or so years before the depression. America had a big social shift due to the industrial revolution and people found themselves doing jobs their parents never dreamed of doing. There was a lack of management at companies and a lot of people got promoted despite their social class and needed to learn fast how to fit in. There were other books published around the same time on similar topics.
How To Win Friends, Think And Grow Rich, and Robert Greene’s books are guides for human interaction that you can follow consciously even if you don’t feel any emotion during those interactions. But they all show that caring about other people—not just being polite to everyone, but learning about them as an individual—will usually make them care about you. Yes, this does benefit you, but your gain comes from being good to others. There’s no exploitation, just a much sharper awareness of relationship building. They definitely made me a better person. I was quite socially awkward because of my mother’s abuse and these books helped me connect with people. The world would be a much better place if people studied these books instead of following dogmatic religions.