Steve Salerno's 2002 book Sham ought to be right up my alley. It's subtitled "How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless," and seeks to expose both the far-reaching influence of the self-help movement, and the uselessness of it.

But as I read it, I had this problem. I kept stopping to re-read passages and wonder, "Does this guy have a problem with women?"

Consider the following: although this book has absolutely nothing to do with feminism, feminism crops up seven times according to the index. (And I noted an eighth occurrence that wasn't indexed.) Furthermore, feminism is only depicted in a bad light, as the evil hissing harpy in the corner, the one who convinced all those happy housewives to leave their homes and get jobs and JUST LOOK WHERE THAT GOT US.

In fact, Salerno seems to blame feminism for the entire self-help movement. I guess because women wouldn't be feeling inadequate and looking for answers if they were still stuck barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen? I'm sure he doesn't really believe this, but that is certainly the impression that I get from his book. He repeatedly acknowledges that the gains women have experienced since the 1960s are a double-edged sword. But then he goes right back to blaming the self-help movement for America's rising divorce rate.

As a final straw, in one of the final chapters we have an entire three-page segment on "the feminization of society" which could have come straight from the mouth of Rush Limbaugh. It includes such puzzlingly aggressive gems as "the knee-jerk assumption that nonviolence is always preferable to violence - itself a product of the "progressive" thinking of SHAM and related movements - is open to question."

Salerno has some good points to make. But I wish he had made them better. Too often he goes off half-cocked, fails to make his case convincingly, or keeps going back to worry the same old bone which has long since been stripped of any marrow. His tirades frequently seem more the product of emotion than of factual data, and isn't that the kind of intellectual laziness that he frowns upon when the self-help gurus engage in it?

For example, when he asserts, out of the blue, that "today's young people […] Loath to play the fool, they hold back something of themselves in anticipation of a better alternative," he provides no citation other than his own observances. He has no credentials to make such an assumption, nor does he have any data. Hypocritical much?

Perhaps most damning, Salerno spends the entire book deliberately conflating correlation with causation. Granted he makes a few hand-wavey gestures towards the knowledge that a lot of things have happened in the last 40 years, and maybe the self-help movement isn't responsible for everything. But then he will go right back to blaming the self-help movement for everything from obesity rates to falling test scores. He also insists on seeing the self-help movement as a cause rather than a symptom, which I think would have been a more accurate (and interesting) line of attack.