A delightful history of the American obsession with advice and self-help, told through the lives and wisdom of three centuries of advice-givers -- from Poor Richard to Dr. Spock to Miss Manners.
Americans, for all our talk of pulling themselves up by our bootstraps, obsessively seek advice on matters large and small. Perhaps precisely because we believe in bettering ourselves and our circumstances in life, we ask for guidance constantly. And this has been true since our nation's earliest days: from the colonial era on, there have always been people eager to step up and offer advice,...