my mind on books

Usually this blog focuses on keeping up with all the new books coming out but recently I came across The Authoritative Guide to Self-Help Books by John W. Santrock, Ann M. Minnett, and Barbara D. Campbell (Guilford Press, 1994), which provided an opportunity to look back at some classic self-help titles.

The book is based on a US survey of 500 mental health professionals who rated over 1000 books in 32 categories. Most of the book reviews the titles by category, rating them from “strongly recommended” to “strongly not recommended.” At the end there is a list of “the twenty-five best self-help books,” those highest rated overall (linked to most current edition at Amazon):

1. The Courage to Heal by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis
2. Feeling Good by David Burns
3. Infants and Mothers by T. Berry Brazelton
4. What Every Baby Knows by T. Berry Brazelton
5. Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care by Benjamin Spock [8th ed. coauthor is Robert Needlman]
6. How to Survive the Loss of a Love by Melba Colgrove, Harold Bloomfield, and Peter McWilliams
7. To Listen to a Child by T. Berry Brazelton
8. The Boys and Girls Book About Divorce by Richard Gardner
9. The Dance of Anger by Harriet Lerner
10. The Feeling Good Handbook by David Burns
11. Toddlers and Parents by T. Berry Brazelton
12. Your Perfect Right by Robert Alberti and Michael Emmons
13. Between Parent and Teenager by Haim Ginott
14. The First Three Years of Life by Burton White
15. What Color Is Your Parachute? by Richard Bolles
16. Between Parent and Child by Haim Ginott
17. The Relaxation Response by Herbert Benson
18. The New Aerobics by Kenneth Cooper
19. Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman
20. Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl
21. Children: The Challenge by Rudolph Dreikurs
22. You Just Don’t Understand by Deborah Tannen
23. The Dance of Intimacy by Harriet Lerner
24. Beyond the Relaxation Response by Herbert Benson
25. The Battered Woman by Lenore Walker

More recently, Authoritative Guide to Self-Help Resources in Mental Health, Revised Edition came out in 2003 with some overlap in authors, but going beyond self-help books to include autobiographies, films, online resources and support groups. It will be interesting to see if this edition has a comparable list of top books or top resources.