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" Did your inner child do cartwheels when that beaver shot of Dr. Laura hit the Web? And are you convinced that the world is going to hell in a premium tote bag when PBS hands over large chunks of prime time to Dr. Wayne Dyer? If the answer to any of the above questions is yes--and if you&amp;#039;re a cranky 60-something tree farmer from Virginia who uses words like obtund--then you have a lot in common with Tom Tiede, the author of Self-Help Nation (Atlantic Monthly Press, $23), a satisfyingly snide antidote to titles like All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. Simply put, this book is chicken soup for the curmudgeonly soul, as Tiede, a former war correspondent, unleashes a tide of bile against the way the self-help industry&amp;#039;s hug merchants and dysfunction mongers profit from human weakness and offer guidance to the gullible on how to scan obits for rich widowers, cure warts with mental exercise, find the spiritual path to instant cash, and, most obtundingly, conjecture like a gutter Aquinas on whether, as Tiede tartly puts it, &amp;quot;Jesus had a trouser snake.&amp;quot; Go have a highball and get real, America. --MARK ROZZO  Six for Your Shelf 1).UNIFORM: ORDER AND DISORDER (Charta, $35) is a stunning pictorial history of how military uniforms influenced 20th-century fashion, shaping everything from Michael Jackson&amp;#039;s costumes to Benetton ads. The book is edited by Francesco Bonami, Maria Luisa Frisa, and Esquire&amp;#039;s Stefano Tonchi. 2) CHESTER HIMES: A LIFE (Walker and Co., $28), by James Sallis, is a biography of a major, and virtually unknown, 20th-century literary figure. Himes, a crime writer, published 11 stories in Esquire from 1934 to 1959.  3) WALKING THE BIBLE: A JOURNEY BY LAND THROUGH THE FIVE BOOKS OF MOSES (Morrow, $25) is Bruce Feiler&amp;#039;s fascinating chronicle of his 10,000-mile trek through the Mideast.  4) Mark Jude Poirier&amp;#039;s GOATS (Talk Miramax/Hyperion, $22) has got to go straight to the top of the list of great stoner novels. 5) OUR TWISTED HERO (Hyperion East, $22), by Yi Munyol, is, remarkably, the first Korean novel in translation to be published by a major house. 6) Peter Hessler&amp;#039;s memoir, RIVER TOWN: TWO YEARS ON THE YANGTZE (HarperCollins, $26), is a work of grace and profundity about teaching English in a small town in China. \u00BBWar Story British novelist Pat Barker understands the dynamics of psychic trauma and shutdown as well as any writer living. In her monumental Regeneration trilogy, she paced the old Hemingway perimeter, writing about World War I, though not through the usual historically normative lens, seeing it rather as the unspeakable decimation of innumerable private universes.  Now, in Border Crossing (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $22), Barker brings post-traumatic stress disorder from the literal to the domestic battlefield. The novel turns on the startling encounter after many years between Tom, a child psychiatrist, and Danny, the now-grown boy at whose murder trial he once testified. Danny petitions for some follow-up counseling. Under the bandages, the past remains raw. As Tom patiently reassembles the story of Danny&amp;#039;s remorseless crime, the outlines of the background situation come into view--the abusive father, the mother slowly dying of cancer. &amp;quot;I hated her because I couldn&amp;#039;t help her,&amp;quot; Danny confides, and we feel the terrible mingling of his love and rage. Tom--who is coming to terms with his own private failures--discovers ever greater levels of implication in the doctor-patient relationship. Barker&amp;#039;s prose is flexed to deliver the blows of emerging revelation, ultimately to confirm our darkest suspicion: that the daily face of things is laid tissue-thin over a grimace. To really look at the world is to shudder. --SVEN BIRKERTS THE RULES Rule No. 112: Never name a child after a continent, a nation, or a commonwealth. Rule No. 113: Or after a body of water. Rule No. 114: Especially if that body of water is a canal. Rule No. 302: More nougat. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a1381/god-help-all-0401/>