McGee, Micki. Self-Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life.

• Author: Simons, Lori
• Position: Book review

McGee, Micki. Self-Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 199 pages. Cloth, $29.95.

A thought-provoking and well-written account, Self-Help, Inc. offers a comprehensive analysis of the culture of the literary self-improvement movement. The author provides detailed examples and description of metaphors to show how cultural changes have influenced and continue to influence the self-help generation. McGee conveys to the reader that self-invention can be traced back to Benjamin Franklin's model of the self-made gentleman-citizen model and has evolved into a billion-dollar industry. McGee cites Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey (1998), Sex and the Single Girl by Helen Gurley Brown (1982), and The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan (1963) to support her views of the self-help literature. McGee offers insight into how this type of literature specifically serves to help people cope with ever-changing social and economic conditions.

McGee's scope of the self-help literature is broad. The role of women, the deconstruction of traditional American family life, the need for self-sufficiency, and the basic need for continual self-improvement are covered in great detail. Television shows such as Extreme Makeover, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and Dr. Phil are described as extensions of the self-help movement. McGee sensibly argues how television and literature are intertwined and have been used as a forum to calm one's anxiety about the social, political, and economic changes in American life. However, she points out how these forums may contribute to more instead of less social anxiety, and how the new notion of self-improvement has moved farther away from the origins of the self-help movement. Her parallel discussion of historical and current trends in the self-help movement is an undercurrent theme in the book.

The content of the book describes the significant shifts in the meaning of "self-help" during the past three decades. For example, self-help was originally used to describe self-improvements in an individual. Later, self-help referred to mutual support such as self-help groups. Recently, this term has been used to describe how individuals can enhance their emotional well-being. McGee provides detailed examples to demonstrate shifts in self-help literature that correlate with American norms of turning to therapeutic intervention over religion and the most recent trend of...