I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help Fashions

Kaminer takes potshots at the omnipresent 12-step self-help groups that are threatening to put psychotherapists out of work. She dismisses the rhetoric and religiosity of the programs, finds their intimacy manufactured and their emphasis on ``higher power'' authoritarian. TV talk shows with true confessions by commoners and celebrities further debase the New Age movement, the author contends in a funny chapter. She also takes aim at Norman Vincent Peale, Werner Erhard and Shirley MacLaine accusing them of a related ``Don't Worry Be Happy'' approach. Kaminer, lawyer, journalist and author of A Fearful Freedom , credibly portrays the sillier aspects of recovery groups and offers some good one-liners: ``The Family that reveals together, congeals together.'' (June)