"Samuel Smiles is alive and well and available to lead us into the next decade...The Victorian moralist's universal best-seller...is a better guide to the prevailing political and economic orthodoxy than the incomprehensible texts of that other 19th century thinker, Karl Marx." Joe Rogaly, The Financial Times. "The message of this book, which is readable and full of stunning quotations, is: God helps those who help themselves. A century after smiles' death we have had to learn this all over again - the hard way." Paul Johnson, The Daily Mail. "Samuel Smiles' Self-Help is one of those books whose titles is so familiar that we think we have read it. To my shame I had not actually done so until it was splendidly reprinted this year." Peter Lilley, The Sunday Telegraph. "Self-Help is about the nobility of strengthening one's character and should provide food for thought." Times Higher Education Supplement. "As a storyteller [Smiles] is vivid, most of all when he conjures up the industrial revolutionaries: Wedgewood, Watt, Arkwright, George Stephenson and even Jonas Hanway, who taught City men their habit of carrying umbrellas." Christopher Fildes, The Spectator.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
Who better to take inspirational advice from than a man named Smiles? But unlike the feel-good cheerleading that the term "self-help" says to us today, to Smiles it might well have been synonymous with "hard work." For this 1859 volume is dedicated to "stimulat[ing] youths to apply themselves diligently to right pursuits,--sparing neither labour, pains, nor self-denial in prosecuting them--and to rely upon their own efforts in life."
Though the author himself admits his lessons are "old-fashioned but wholesome," he nevertheless delivers stern but well-intentioned lectures on such commonsense concepts as the importance of learning from failure, how work is the best teacher, and the value of thrift, gentility, and honesty, all peppered with examples of such noble industry from the lives of writers, scientists, artists, inventors, educators, philanthropists, missionaries, and--gulp!--martyrs. It's as if all paternal wisdom had been reduced to a single book.
Peter W. Sinnema is an Associate Professor, Department of English at the University of Alberta.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
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Hardcover. Condition: Very Good. Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good. Hardback in jacket 1997. 24x16cm. xv+254 pages. Clean & tight book. No inscriptions. Flat pages. Jacket is not torn. Jacket is now under clear removable covers. Dispatched with TRACKING next working day or sooner securely boxed in cardboard. ref o-blb. Seller Inventory # 047406
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