From Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, published in 1936, which has sold over 30 million copies to date, to the mind management programme of Professor Steve Peters' The Chimp Paradox, a concise and insightful guide to 70 of the most influential self-help books ever published.

An entertaining, accessible companion, for listeners of self-help books and sceptics alike. The titles include classics on achieving success, confidence and happiness, mindfulness, how to change your life, self-control, overcoming anxiety and self-esteem issues and stress relief. The chronological arrangement of the titles reveals the intriguing story of how early self-improvement titles were succeeded by increasingly personality-based, materialistic titles and shows how breakout classics often influenced other titles for decades to come.

Each book is summarised to convey a brief idea of what it has to offer the interested listener, while a 'Speed Read' for each book delivers a quick sense of what each writer is like to listen to and a highly compressed summary of the main points of the book in question. This is a work of reference to dip into, that acknowledges that some of the most powerful insights into ourselves can be found in texts that aren't perceived as being 'self-help' books, and that wisdom and consolation can be found in the strangest places.