Don't expect advice from Tiede

Looking for quick answers to life's little problems? Then don't look toward Tom Tiede.

Tiede, author of Self-Help Nation: The Long Overdue, Entirely Justified, Delightfully Hostile Guide to the Snake-Oil Peddlers Who Are Sapping Our Nation's Soul (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2001), has compiled 224 pages of reasons why those ubiquitous self-help books are corrupting the foundation of the United States. Self-Help Nation is a remarkably well-thought-out - and remarkably poorly-written - book, which disassembles many of the prominent self-help books of today and proves just how they are taking apart the social fabric that binds America together.

Tiede dedicates the book "to the ideas, writing, and poetry that are superior to my own, two of the three easy to find in this world." It is an accurate dedication. His writing seems intentionally relaxed, with little concern for sentence structure; it instead is reminiscent of the train-of-thought "free writings" assigned in high school.

He begins each chapter with a poem relating to the chapter's theme. In the chapter on God and religion, he pens, "I don't have much faith in man./ But more in him than in God,/ Who promises more than man,/ And provides less." Poetry such as this seems better suited to a college introductory poetry class than in a book designed to show the flaws in the self-help industry.

Yet, while Tiede's prose and poetry are lacking, his depth of ideas makes the book worth pouring through. He opens the book with a scene in a recently repossessed house, where he had been taken to see if he wanted to purchase any of the books for his bookstore. In the basement, he found 600 books on self-improvement and "do-it-yourself betterment." The total value: $12,000. Had the owner spent that money on the mortgage, instead, who knows what would have happened?

It is this theme that runs throughout Tiede's book. While the introduction is a mix of personal stories, sociology and ranting, the remainder of the book could more accurately be called commentary. Tiede takes apart the staples of self-help - both the books and the authors - and demonstrates not only why their ideas have no merit, but exactly where the fallacies lie.

As Tiede demonstrates through his humorous and piercing commentary, he thinks people have given up on the concept of self-reliance. In the United States, instead of taking responsibility for our own actions and understanding our own faults, we now turn to others, who tell us how we can quit smoking, how we can lose weight, how we can improve our sex lives and how we land a better job.

A fantastic book Tiede analyzes is called How to Marry the Rich, written by "America's foremost 'Marry Rich' consultant," Ginie Polo Sayles. Sayles calls her prey "sugar daddies and sugar mommas," and suggests moving to where the rich live if you want to marry one of them, also reminding us, of course, that it's best to stalk the most vulnerable rich, so to check out the newspaper obituaries and find the most-recently widowed to prey on. It certainly appears as if Sayles found an audience upon which to prey.

And, of course, Tiede looks at the hundreds of self-help books on the ever-present topic of sex and relationships. He quotes Taking Time for Love, in which the authors say, "Seek professional help when you and your spouse both refuse to listen to each other." To which he replies, "Forget it, work it out yourself, or break up. Professionals' are merely people - they are as mystified by relationships as everyone else; they are as angry, as impotent, as divorced as the rest of us."

Of course, on the topic of sex, Tiede can't avoid taking his own shot: "The better approach would be to lighten up a tad. Sex is meant to be hilarious, not serious. If you can't grin while you grind, you don't get it."

The message, though drawn out through 10 chapters and twice as many book dissections, is simple. "Try coping," writes Tiede. "If that fails, try the priesthood, walking to Belmopan or Jack Kevorkian. You'd do better selling crack than leafing through massifs of fix-up advice, and the pay is steady." There are no magic bullet solutions, and those who peddle self-improvement as simple are just as foolish and responsible as those who believe them.