Readers of Joshua Loth Liebman’s Peace of Mind

IF 0.1 0 HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY

Reception-Texts Readers Audiences History Pub Date : 2014-07-07 DOI:10.5325/RECEPTION.6.1.0038

C. Oestreicher

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Abstract

vol. 6, 2014 Copyright © 2014 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA In 1946, Simon & Schuster published Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman’s bestselling book Peace of Mind, a selfhelp manual that explained how psychiatry and religion together could help individuals achieve emotional and spiritual maturity, and ultimately happiness. At the time of its publication, Liebman was a rabbi at Boston’s Temple Israel and was well known from his sermons on the NBC radio program Message to Israel, broadcast in Boston and New York City. Significantly, Liebman was, in the words of Matthew S. Hedstrom, the first “non-Christian author to reach a mass audience in the United States” and Donald Meyer has called Peace of Mind “the book first heralding the whole flood of postwar religious bestsellers.”1 The book reached readers on six continents, was on the New York Times bestseller list for 173 weeks and the Publishers Weekly bestseller list for 147 weeks, and, by 1964, went into its thirty-eighth printing. The significance of Peace of Mind lay in the way Liebman blended religion, psychology, and self-help and the degree to which his readers accepted him as an expert in all three areas. Prior to World War II, selfhelp books were gaining momentum, largely owing to the popularity of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People (1937) and Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich (1937). Religious authors such as Harry Readers of Joshua Loth Liebman’s Peace of Mind

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约书亚·罗思·利伯曼《心灵的平静》的读者

1946年，西蒙与舒斯特出版了拉比·约书亚·罗思·利伯曼的畅销书《心灵的平静》，这本自助手册解释了精神病学和宗教如何共同帮助个人实现情感和精神的成熟，并最终获得幸福。在这本书出版时，利伯曼是波士顿以色列圣殿的一名拉比，他因在NBC广播节目《致以色列的信息》(Message to Israel)上的布道而闻名，该节目在波士顿和纽约市播出。重要的是，用马修·s·赫德斯特罗姆(Matthew S. Hedstrom)的话来说，利伯曼是第一个“在美国获得大量读者的非基督教作家”，唐纳德·迈耶(Donald Meyer)称《心灵的平静》是“第一本预示着战后宗教畅销书浪潮的书”。这本书的读者遍及六大洲，在《纽约时报》畅销书排行榜上停留了173周，在《出版人周刊》畅销书排行榜上停留了147周，到1964年，它已经印刷了38次。《心灵的平静》的意义在于，利伯曼将宗教、心理学和自助结合在一起，他的读者也在一定程度上接受了他在这三个领域的专家地位。在第二次世界大战之前，自助书籍的势头越来越大，这主要归功于戴尔·卡内基的《如何赢得朋友和影响他人》(1937年)和拿破仑·希尔的《思考致富》(1937年)的流行。宗教作家，如哈利读者约书亚罗思利布曼的心灵的和平

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来源期刊

Reception-Texts Readers Audiences History HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY-

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0.10

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期刊介绍： Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History is a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal published once a year. It seeks to promote dialog and discussion among scholars engaged in theoretical and practical analyses in several related fields: reader-response criticism and pedagogy, reception study, history of reading and the book, audience and communication studies, institutional studies and histories, as well as interpretive strategies related to feminism, race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and postcolonial studies, focusing mainly but not exclusively on the literature, culture, and media of England and the United States.