The Moving Picture Girls in War Plays - Or, The Sham Battles at Oak Farm is presented here in a high quality paperback edition. This popular classic work by Laura Lee Hope is in the English language, and may not include graphics or images from the original edition. If you enjoy the works of Laura Lee Hope then we highly recommend this publication for your book collection.

This fully updated and expanded book is not about how the music business should work, but how it does work. Industry insider Moses Avalon tells it like it is - how producers dip into budgets, artists steal songs, lawyers write contracts in code - and shows you how to survive these and other career-stifling situations. Deconstructing actual major and indie-label record deals, this book dissects each party's involvement and offers perspective on their actual roles, how much they get paid, and what their agendas really are. Engineers, managers, producers, artists, labels and lawyers each take their turn in the hot seat. It also outlines realistic alternatives for newcomers, such as "baby" production deals and vanity labels. This third edition includes: an entire chapter comparing ASCAP and BMI - a publishing first * new insights for indie artists, including the lowdown on digital-distribution scams and independent AandR * information on new legislation and its impact on sampling and other legal matters * new music-industry "family trees" that reflect recent consolidation and reorganization * 80 pages of new material * and much more.

Self-help: To millions of Americans it seems like a godsend. To many others it seems like a joke. But as investigative reporter Steve Salerno reveals in this groundbreaking book, it’s neither—in fact it’s much worse than a joke. Going deep inside the Self-Help and Actualization Movement (fittingly, the words form the acronym SHAM), Salerno offers the first serious exposé of this multibillion-dollar industry and the real damage it is doing—not just to its paying customers, but to all of American society.

Based on the author’s extensive reporting—and the inside look at the industry he got while working at a leading “lifestyle” publisher—SHAM shows how thinly credentialed “experts” now dispense advice on everything from mental health to relationships to diet to personal finance to business strategy. Americans spend upward of $8 billion every year on self-help programs and products. And those staggering financial costs are actually the least of our worries.

SHAM demonstrates how the self-help movement’s core philosophies have infected virtually every aspect of American life—the home, the workplace, the schools, and more. And Salerno exposes the downside of being uplifted, showing how the “empowering” message that dominates self-help today proves just as damaging as the blame-shifting rhetoric of self-help’s “Recovery” movement.

SHAM also reveals:

• How self-help gurus conduct extensive market research to reach the same customers over and over—without ever helping them

• The inside story on the most notorious gurus—from Dr. Phil to Dr. Laura, from Tony Robbins to John Gray

• How your company might be wasting money on motivational speakers, “executive coaches,” and other quick fixes that often hurt quality, productivity, and morale

• How the Recovery movement has eradicated notions of personal responsibility by labeling just about anything—from drug abuse to “sex addiction” to shoplifting—a dysfunction or disease

• How Americans blindly accept that twelve-step programs offer the only hope of treating addiction, when in fact these programs can do more harm than good

• How the self-help movement inspired the disastrous emphasis on self-esteem in our schools

• How self-help rhetoric has pushed people away from proven medical treatments by persuading them that they can cure themselves through sheer application of will

As Salerno shows, to describe self-help as a waste of time and money vastly understates its collateral damage. And with SHAM, the self-help industry has finally been called to account for the damage it has done.


Also available as an eBook


From the Hardcover edition.

Rumi's son wrote, "After meeting Shams, my father danced all day and sang all night. He had been a scholar; now he became a poet. He had been an ascetic, now he became drunk with Love." Shams of Tabriz was, indeed, Rumi's Sun, the one who caused him to radiate Divine Love. After almost 800 years the that light is spreading ore than ever to encompass the whole of the world.

"Here is the dazzling stillness that Rumi spun around and around in his longing. ~Peter Kingsley
"Look into the burning breast of Shams of Tabriz and you will see the Beloved looking back at you." ~Pir Zia Inayat-Khan

Rumi's son wrote, "After meeting Shams, my father danced all day and sang all night. He had been a scholar; now he became a poet. He had been an ascetic, now he became drunk with Love." Shams of Tabriz was, indeed, Rumi's Sun, the one who caused him to radiate Divine Love. After almost 800 years the that light is spreading ore than ever to encompass the whole of the world.

"Here is the dazzling stillness that Rumi spun around and around in his longing. ~Peter Kingsley
"Look into the burning breast of Shams of Tabriz and you will see the Beloved looking back at you." ~Pir Zia Inayat-Khan

• Also, in this issue:
• The Hare's Mask. A story by Mark Slouka.

Monthly political, current events and literary magazine.