Life is difficult. Three words opened The Road Less Traveled in 1978, and they are probably the most quoted first line in the history of self-help. The book sold almost nothing in its first year, spread by word of mouth alone, and then stayed on the American bestseller lists for more than a decade.
Morgan Scott Peck was an American psychiatrist who served in the army medical corps before going into private practice, and he wrote from the consulting room rather than the seminar. His distinctive move was to refuse the separation between psychiatry and religion: discipline, love, grace and responsibility were treated in the same breath as neurosis and denial, and he was equally willing to annoy the secular and the devout.
He went on to write about community, about lies and self-deception, and about the difficult business of growing up at any age. He died in 2005, and the books have gone on being handed from reader to reader.
1 hour and 26 minutes
