I think this a great strategy for many of the many self-help/life management type books that come out now too. They usually contain a few useful nuggets surrounded by a couple of hundred pages of cherry picked anecdotes posing as evidence and/or self-aggrandizing .
I have always said that you can gain more value from self-help/life management type books by reading the table of contents and then spending the time you would have read the book just thinking about those topics and coming to your own conclusions.
This is obviously a bit hyperbole but seriously most self help books could be an article instead and I wouldn't miss anything that was cut
Yeah most self-help books start off as viral articles, popular newspaper editorals, or conference talks, and publishers will then approach the creators of these ideas and ask them to write a book about it.
The formula is simple, the idea you presented has already demonstrated itself as extremely popular. But only a thousand people can attend that conference, let's print it as a book and sell it in airports, websites, and stores around the world as a nice packaged book that everyone can buy and it will surely be just as popular but we can sell it to more people.
But then the problem. Writing down the original idea only takes a few pages, maybe 10-20. So we let the author expound a little, which brings it up to 80 pages. But still no one is going to pay $20 for an 80 page book, so the publishers ask them to break small sub-concepts into entire chapters to get to the magical 275-325 page mark that 95% of books sell at. These fit into shipping boxes well, every store bookshelf is designed around this size, even US Postal Service's "Media Mail" is optimized around this sizing.
So in the end, you are left with most self-help books being extremely padded to get to the the standard mass-market-paperback size. So books that should be long blog posts or a 15 min presentation get dragged out into 275 page epics where it becomes clear by the end that the author has ran out of stuff to say and is just filling the page count.
One great example right now is the top-selling book: "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F$&#". I highly recommend everyone go to the nearest bookstore and read the first introduction and first chapter. They are absolute gold. The author summarizes the whole book in about 20 pages and does an excellent job. It is well written, entertaining, and enlightening. Everything you want in a good book. But then you can put the book down and walk away. Because the next 225 pages are just rehashing the same thing from the first chapter. Repeating itself. The author is clearly trying to reach the minimum 250 page count that the publisher will allow. He is grasping at straws and just re-iterating the same basic concept for 80% of the book. Sadly most self-help books are the same thing. Great concepts that need to be 20-50 pages.
Not without some solid companions that bludgeon transcendetalism. For contemporaries, probably Poe. (On New England Transcendentalism, specifically). Melville and Hawthorne make good reads as well.
Emerson, like so many self-help books, offers what looks on the surface trivial and immediately obvious, providing a seemingly simple "if-only" path. Meanwhile, his ideas on individualism have done untold damage to society as a whole.
This isn't to imply something simple as "Emerson is wrong". He has valid insights. But reading them in a vacuum, assuming Emerson alone is sufficient reading, is not the best approach.
Ultimately, it is no accident Emerson suggests to "set at naught books and traditions", because that is the only way his ideas can survive unscathed.
(fwiw, the advice of "read widely" holds for any given book. Never believe one person has the answers)
