This study is more academic and less pointed than Wendy Kaminer's recent I'm Dysfunctional, You're Disfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help Fashions. Unlike many critics, Simonds, a sociologist at Emory University, acknowledges some value in self-help books, as do the 30 women whose reading habits she studies. Though Simonds sometimes lapses into academic jargon, she also invokes academic research on women as nurturers to explain women's interest in self-help. She takes a broad view: after analyzing the spiritual and therapeutic quests these books represent, she looks at readers' letters thanking the authors of The Feminine Mystique and Women Who Love Too Much for assuaging their loneliness. Surveying 28 years of self-help unisex bestsellers, she discerns two categories: those that recommend rational thought and those that emphasize personal growth. Books aimed at women, she notes, portray their subjects as both omnipotent and powerless. Though Simonds suggests that such books do not always encourage self-blame nor do they necessarily block societal change, she concludes that they offer an illusory cure for problems that are ultimately not individual. (Sept.)
