attempted to describe what made the book popular. As time passed, however, scholarly reviews became more critical, chiding Carnegie for being insincere and manipulative. How to Win Friends and Influence People was written for a popular audience and Carnegie successfully captured the attention of his target. The book experienced mass consumption and appeared in many popular periodicals, including garnering 10 pages in the January 1937 edition of Reader's Digest. The book continued to remain at the top of best-seller lists and was even noted in the New York Times to have been extremely successful in Nazi Germany, much to the writer's bewilderment. He wrote that Carnegie would rate "butter higher than guns as a means of winning friends" something "diametrically opposite to the official German view." Carnegie described his book as an "action-book" but it is today categorized as one of the first in the self-help genre. Almost every self-help book since has borrowed some type of style or form from Carnegie's "path-breaking best seller." Legacy Warren Buffett took the Dale Carnegie course "How to Win Friends and Influence People" when he was 20 years old, and to this day has the diploma in his office. The book is said to have greatly influenced the life of television and film actress Donna Reed. It was given to her by her high school chemistry teacher Edward Tompkins to read as a sophomore at Denison (Iowa) High School in 1936. Upon reading it she won the lead in the school play, was voted Campus Queen and was in the top 10 of the 1938 graduating class. Charles Manson used what he learned from the book in prison to manipulate women into killing on his behalf. During the 1998 kidnapping of LDS missionaries in Saratov, Russia, the kidnapped missionaries used strategies from the book in an attempt for leniency from their captors. References External links 1936 non-fiction books Self-help books Books about friendship Books by Dale Carnegie