Abstract
Before the age of Amazon.com, I did much of my book shopping on my trips to New York and London. I would systematically scout the sections that interested me, and these included, of course, philosophy and psychology. Through the 1990s I witnessed a rapid development. In the early 1990s a large Barnes & Noble would have bookcases about ten meters long that carried serious psychology titles followed by one bookcase of “self-help/self-improvement” books. Within a span of a few years the proportions had changed completely. There is hardly any psychology left, and the space is taken up by the “self-help/self-improvement” section that is often augmented with a lot of spirituality titles.
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Notes
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© 2011 Carlo Strenger
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Strenger, C. (2011). The Defeat of Mind. In: The Fear of Insignificance. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230117662_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230117662_4
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