In the 1980s and '90s, thousands of women wrote to psychiatrist M. Scott Peck, MD, to thank him for helping them find fresh meaning in their lives through his ground-breaking, best-selling self-help book, 'The Road Less Traveled' (1978). Through his workshops, his appearances on 'Oprah' and elsewhere - and because he was a psychiatrist - Peck made self-help respectable for a wide-ranging audience.

Yet Peck's own life was in turmoil. A classic wounded healer, and something of a control freak, he made life difficult for his family, not least given his extramarital affairs.

Arthur Jones's 'Boomer Guru' explores this dichotomy in a deeply researched, candid biography based primarily on hours of recorded interviews with the frank but conflicted guru. An intriguing look at the times and at the man, this biography of "the nation's shrink" is that rare account: a psychiatrist on the couch.