Resolving to read the best in self-help books

Nobody's perfect. Still, it's nothing that a few well-aimed New Year's resolutions can't put right by spring. Here to help you do the job is the latest crop of self-help books, peaking as always in January, just in time for the home/self improvement season. Why not let us make your resolutions for you, and you'll marvel at the amazing match between your needs and the latest available help.

Positive thinking is the common denominator in almost all these books. I started my "resolution" reading months ago. Am I now wiser, richer, thinner? Well, not that you'd notice, but, boy, am I cheerful!

I resolve to take charge of my life.

Help Yourself: Celebrating the Rewards of Resilience and Gratitude by Dave Pelzer. Among self-help gurus, Pelzer carries authority because he writes from the heart of life. After enduring a stunning childhood of abuse from a mentally unstable mother, which he has recounted in three past books, he shares here his hard-won discoveries about survival. Using reader-friendly anecdotes, he counsels action, not passive endurance, and forcefully advises readers to "get rid of the garbage," like unresolved issues and resentments, through forgiveness, if nothing else works. Then you set up "small, bite-sized, just-beyond-reach kinds of goals." Apply yourself; bounce back. He sounds, in fact, like my dad. That's OK. My dad was a very wise man.


Dan Millman's Living on Purpose: Straight Answers to Life's Tough Questions covers much the same territory using a brisk question-and-answer format to advance 25 principles of life, called (by his mentor "Socrates" in "Way of the Peaceful Warrior") the "House Rules." Many of these have a familiar sound ("What goes around comes around") but there is much uncliched wisdom here too, like "Life develops what it demands." Millman's strength ties into the familiar. "Universal truths reveal themselves everywhere in daily life," he says, and he downplays emotions in favor of action. At the end of each question and answer, Millman provides a page or two of "Personal Application" for the reader to consider. For readable, common sense advice to help arrest the drifting life, this book is probably your best bet this season.


I resolve to manage my finances wisely.

For good general advice on such abstruse matters as stocks, bonds and asset allocation, Jean Chatzky's Talking Money: Everything You Need to Know about Your Finances and Your Future fulfills its title promise. My mind is not financially agile, but Chatzky (columnist for Money magazine and others) caters to my type, covering small details of large issues like debt, saving, investing, college and retirement planning, insurance, real estate and estate planning, in easy, well-organized doses that should add many educated investors to the financial pool in 2001. She makes it sound almost easy.


If this is all Greek to you, be sure to read Chatzky before you pick up Robert Sheard's Money For Life: Build the Wealth You Need to Live Your Dream. But do pick up Sheard, because where Chatzky gives you sound general principles, Sheard, top financial author and stock picker for The Motley Fool, reaches into the financial pie and pulls out a plum: how to achieve financial independence even before retirement, so that you can stop working and live your dream life. Financially speaking, anyway. His step-by-step guide to building your nest egg involves the "20 Factor Formula" which even I could understand. But start now: "time . . . matters more than the amount" you begin with.


I resolve to be a new person by this time next year.

What you'll need along the way is Cheryl Richardson's Life Makeovers: 52 Practical & Inspiring Ways to Improve Your Life One Week at a Time. Author of the best-selling Take Time for Your Life, Richardson provides a schedule of insights, one a week, adding up to a year-long program that suggests "a particular area of personal or professional growth" to work on each week. What adds kick to the format is the addition of a specific "Action Challenge" to help readers address each week's concern. Richardson also includes great lists of resources, books, organizations and websites for each topic, along with specific addresses for accessing them. If you're not a new person by 2002, at least you'll know why not!


I resolve to lose weight, get in shape, and just generally take care of myself physically, and this time I mean it.

The Mayo Clinic comes to your rescue with the soundest, most well-rounded, easy-reading and sensible personal healthcare book of the year, Mayo Clinic on Healthy Weight. Editor Donald Hensrud is a Mayo Clinic consultant, director of the Executive Health Program there and assistant professor of preventive medicine and nutrition at Mayo Medical School. Mayo Clinic introduces the new Mayo Clinic Healthy Weight Pyramid, and features a 16-page Color Guide to Healthy Eating, along with recipes from The Mayo Clinic/Williams Sonoma Cookbook. Its assessment of popular weight-loss programs, medications and operations supplies balanced information that makes this not just a diet book but a good advice manual, with solid counsel you can count on, especially if you're counting calories.


If sticking to a diet seems much too difficult, consult The Fidget Factor: The Easy Way to Burn Up to 1000 Extra Calories Every Day by Frank I. Katch and Victor L. Katch with Gene Brown. Based (ironically) on a Mayo Clinic study, it offers a weight-loss program exploiting the calorie-burning qualities of such activities as crossing and uncrossing your legs, or rolling a rubber ball on the table while talking on the phone. The next time somebody waves both arms in the air during an argument, don't take it as a personal threat‹she may just be following the latest fad weight-loss program.

    The Fidget Factor:
    The Easy Way to Burn Up to 1000 Extra Calories Every Day
    By Frank I. Katch and Victor L. Katch with Gene Brown
    Andrews McMeel, $10.95
    ISBN 0740710095

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I resolve to age gracefully and have fun doing it.

Dorothy Cantor's approach in What Do You Want to Do When You Grow Up? Starting the Next Chapter of Your Life mines a major vein in the category of aging by recognizing the tremendous potential for growth during middle age and beyond. You prepare for your senior years by building healthy bodies and healthy bank accounts. But what if you forget to build a life? With copious anecdotes, including an ongoing focus group of individuals who deal with each question along with the reader, Cantor, consultative expert and past president of the American Psychological Association, examines major-league midlife crises. With the help of target questions she energizes the reader to look closely at dreams that have been set aside and consider reinstating them. Then, working from your personal Twenty Questions inventory she helps identify "Ten Motivators" and "Ten Activators" that will inspire you into getting started, again, on realizing those dreams.


Need an antidote for all the positive thinking? Try Rules for Aging: Resist Normal Impulses, Live Longer, Attain Perfection, with 56 worldly-wise nuggets by print and television essayist Roger Rosenblatt. If you don't get any of the other books, get this one. Full of rueful irony and tongue-in-cheek misanthropy, it will seek out every cavity you've got and fill it with gold.


Reviews by Maude McDaniel, a writer from Cumberland, Maryland, who resolves not to make any resolutions this year.

© 2001 ProMotion, inc.
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