There are many many nonfiction “how to survive” books about grief, with varying degrees of  scientific evidence to back up their advice.  The most common type is fairly anecdotal in nature, including a combination of the author's experiences, perhaps describing some of their work with grieving people as a therapist, or while working in one variety of helping profession or another.

Courage to Grieve is precisely in this category: Judy Tatelbaum lost her brother at a relatively young age and describes being unable to grieve him “appropriately.”  She reported having intrusive symptoms more than than twenty years later, and much of the book addresses what she calls “unexpressed” or “unsuccessful” grief. The book talks more in timelines than any other grief book I've encountered and one wonders what the relationship is between Tatelbaum's interest in “how long it takes” and how long it took for her.

Despite these limitations, Courage to Grieve has some portions that may be very helpful for someone undergoing a grief experience (which will, ultimately, be once of us at one time or another) and that are different from those found in other grief self help books. The best is the chapter on Helping Ourselves with Grief: Creative Survival. Tatelbaum describes the importance of what she terms “environmental supports” in a grief experience, and explains the process of locating and developing environmental supports. This is both more practical and more compassionate than the standard grief self help book fare of opining on the importance of formal support groups, even though it's not clear that formal groups are helpful for everyone, depending on the stage of grief and their particular social situation.