REVIEW: Manga for Success: The Psychology of Personal Growth & Better Relationships (nonfiction book) by Toshinori Iwai, scenarios by Hirofumi Hoshi, illustrated by Aki Fukamori

Manga for Success: The Psychology of Personal Growth & Better Relationships is nonfiction combined with fictional manga sections that illustrate the concepts discussed in more depth in the text. I bought my copy new.

Review:

Each book in the "Manga for Success" series alternates between textbookish sections and fictional "scenario" section in manga format. In this volume, Yukari is the area manager of a popular bakery chain. She's constantly frustrated by issues at her stores, and her efforts to deal with them just result in her employees becoming equally as frustrated with and angry at her. While cleaning up a warehouse, she discovers a photograph of psychologist Alfred Adler and his wife. Suddenly, the ghost of Alfred Adler appears. In order to thank Yukari for finding the picture, he decides to teach her about Adlerian psychology so that she can gain a forward-thinking perspective, change her life, and improve her relationships with others.

The author's introduction tells readers that there are three ways they can approach this text: they can read it straight through, they can read the text portions first and then the manga portions, or they can read the manga portions and then the text. I opted to read it all the way through and found that I really enjoyed the way the book was set up. Each time I started to get bored of the text portions, those wrapped up and switched to manga portions, which helped me from getting too bogged down. Yukari's story was designed to illustrate the concepts of Adlerian psychology and wasn't exactly riveting stuff, but it injected just enough "fun stuff" to yank my attention back when it started to drift.

This was very much a self-help sort of book - the idea was to not only come away from the text knowing more about Adlerian psychology, but to also be able to apply those concepts to your own life just like Yukari. While I did find this to be an encouraging book and thought that the author did a great job presenting things in a way that was easy to understand, I still felt that actually applying all of this wouldn't be quite as easy as the author made it seem. For one thing, most of us don't have a tiny Alfred Adler pointing out the exact shifts in thinking needed for our individual situations.

All in all, I thought this was a good book, and I really enjoyed the "text + manga scenarios" format. I'm looking forward to trying other entries in this series.