{"product_id":"2940012884275","title":"The Self-improvement Handbook","description":"In the last half-century or so that the humble \u003cbr\u003eself-help book has jumped to cultural prominence, a \u003cbr\u003efact admitted by both the advocates and the critics \u003cbr\u003e- often highly polarised - of the self-improvement \u003cbr\u003egenre. Some would 'view the buying of such books...\u003cbr\u003eas an exercise in self-education'.Others, more \u003cbr\u003ecritical, still concede that 'it is too prevalent \u003cbr\u003eand powerful a phenomenon to overlook, despite \u003cbr\u003ebelonging to \"pop\" culture'.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor better or worse, it is clear that self-help \u003cbr\u003ebooks have had 'a very important role in developing \u003cbr\u003esocial concepts of disease in the twentieth century'\u003cbr\u003eand that they 'disseminate these concepts through \u003cbr\u003ethe general public so that ordinary people acquire \u003cbr\u003ea language for describing some of the complex and \u003cbr\u003eineffable features of emotional and behavioral \u003cbr\u003elife'.\u003cbr\u003eWhere traditional psychology and psychotherapy will \u003cbr\u003etend to be written in an impersonal, objective mode, \u003cbr\u003emany self-help books 'involve a first-person \u003cbr\u003einvolvement and often a conversion experience' in \u003cbr\u003ekeeping with the self-help support groups on which \u003cbr\u003ethey often draw, horizontal peer-support and \u003cbr\u003evalidation is thus offered the reader, as well as \u003cbr\u003eadvice \"from above\".\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYet arguably with the movement from the self-help \u003cbr\u003egroup to the individual \"self-improvement\" reader \u003cbr\u003esomething of that peer support has been lost, \u003cbr\u003ereflecting the broader way that 'over the course \u003cbr\u003eof the last three decades of the twentieth-century, \u003cbr\u003ethere has been a significant shift in the meaning \u003cbr\u003eof \"self-help\"'. A collective enterprise has \u003cbr\u003ebecome a refashioning of the individual self: 'in \u003cbr\u003eless than thirty years, \"self-help\" - once \u003cbr\u003esynonymous with mutual aid - has come to be \u003cbr\u003eunderstood...as a largely individual undertaking'","brand":"unique5stardeals","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47121110466800,"sku":"2940012884275","price":4.37,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/2940012884275_p0.jpg?v=1763573830","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/2940012884275","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}