Thoughtful contemplations on the pursuit to be happy.
The longtime New Yorker writer waxes philosophical in this slim, aphoristic book.
Gopnik, author of The Real Work, offers an extended essay on a positive and pleasing emotion. When he was 12, the author started to play guitar, and he recalls how happy he was when he first learned how to create “the ringing beauty of the G chord.” “The sense of happiness I felt that week remains resonant,” he writes. Next, Gopnik discusses the young Scottish poet Don Paterson’s obsession with Japanese origami. “Genuine happiness,” he writes, “is always rooted in absorption in something outside us, and begins in accomplishment undertaken for its own sake and pursued to its own odd and buzzing ends.” He argues that accomplishment counts for far more than the “tyranny” of achievement because “it’s more compelling than the concreteness, the trophy pressed in your hands.” Furthermore, “learning to work hard is as important as learning to work well.” Gopnik loves to cook at home, and chopping onions is “my entry to happiness.” For French painter Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres, playing a violin wasn’t just a hobby; it was a “parallel passion, and it fed the already fully achieved virtuosic technical level of his primary art.” Thinking back on his guitar practicing, Gopnik writes, “accomplishment is bounded by the eternal truths of repetition and habituation and exhaustion and renewal.” He posits a “pluralism of pleasures” that extends deeply into our imaginations and practices, and he is a big believer in open societies because they provide more space for accomplishment. Some of the other things that bring the author happiness are the music of the Beatles; walking and biking in Central Park, admiring the work of “one of my personal heroes,” Frederick Law Olmsted; and, of course, the act of writing.
Thoughtful contemplations on the pursuit to be happy.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9781324094852
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.
All right, all right, all right: The affable, laconic actor delivers a combination of memoir and self-help book.
“This is an approach book,” writes McConaughey, adding that it contains “philosophies that can be objectively understood, and if you choose, subjectively adopted, by either changing your reality, or changing how you see it. This is a playbook, based on adventures in my life.” Some of those philosophies come in the form of apothegms: “When you can design your own weather, blow in the breeze”; “Simplify, focus, conserve to liberate.” Others come in the form of sometimes rambling stories that never take the shortest route from point A to point B, as when he recounts a dream-spurred, challenging visit to the Malian musician Ali Farka Touré, who offered a significant lesson in how disagreement can be expressed politely and without rancor. Fans of McConaughey will enjoy his memories—which line up squarely with other accounts in Melissa Maerz’s recent oral history, Alright, Alright, Alright—of his debut in Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, to which he contributed not just that signature phrase, but also a kind of too-cool-for-school hipness that dissolves a bit upon realizing that he’s an older guy on the prowl for teenage girls. McConaughey’s prep to settle into the role of Wooderson involved inhabiting the mind of a dude who digs cars, rock ’n’ roll, and “chicks,” and he ran with it, reminding readers that the film originally had only three scripted scenes for his character. The lesson: “Do one thing well, then another. Once, then once more.” It’s clear that the author is a thoughtful man, even an intellectual of sorts, though without the earnestness of Ethan Hawke or James Franco. Though some of the sentiments are greeting card–ish, this book is entertaining and full of good lessons.
A conversational, pleasurable look into McConaughey’s life and thought.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-13913-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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