The glut of insipid, Chicken Soup-style in- spirational tomes is hardly a new development, but it sure ticks off Tiede, who takes what should have been a Sunday-paper column and stretches it to 200-plus repetitive pages. Taking time to attack seemingly every book in this expansive genre from marriage fixing to financial counseling and counter it with folksy, ''no kid- ding'' platitudes of his own, Tiede unknowingly creates what he hates: a costly, shelf-clogging collection of musings and observations that amount to nothing more than good ol' common sense. C-


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