A hit-or-miss guide to growth and fulfillment, by turns sketchy and inspirational.
You can make your dreams come true by cultivating mindfulness and heeding motivational advice, according to this self-helper.
Mezulari mines his experience using drugs, lessons learned in 12-step recovery groups, and his study of spiritual traditions for insights into living well. Foremost are three rules gleaned from a recovery sponsor: “Be good to yourself” by forgiving yourself for shortcomings and letting go of shame, guilt, and remorse; “go where the love is” by seeking out upstanding people and culling those who try to talk you “out of fulfilling” your dreams; and “you are not your mind” and can practice mindfulness to quiet negative thoughts. The author further expounds on a sometimes dissonant mix of Christian, Buddhist, and New Age ideas, noting that “Christ…created a blanket pardon for all of us to live a life free from the burden of self-inflicted hatred and revenge”; “enlightenment is about nonattachment”; and “like a magnet, your thoughts will draw in your desired reality” by the “law of attraction.” Mezulari also presents his own recovery system, “Do It Yourself Cognitive Therapy,” which replaces “unrealistic and limiting thought patterns with more practical, life-affirming ones.” He says little about the details of DIYCT, but he recommends listening to motivational speeches gleaned from the internet and reading self-help literature as well as avoiding newscasts because of their negativity. The author draws on various advice givers, from evangelist Joel Osteen to film star Arnold Schwarzenegger, but his slender treatise has little space either for philosophical grounding or practical regimens in its disorganized and repetitive pages. His prose is earnest and readable, but it sometimes swerves into the cultic—“I transcended the world illusion and stepped into my anointing, which patiently waited for me to awaken to who I really am”—or the mystical. (“All of us are but a mere blink of an eye in the unfolding process of the universe. Beginning with the alpha and ending with the omega where God exists on both sides simultaneously as a void from which all existence sprouts forth and returns when it reaches its expiration date and can no longer serve his purpose.”) At his best, Mezulari’s injunctions to break through fear, risk aversion, and mediocrity—better to aim high and miss than aim low and hit the mark—are pithy and stirring.
A hit-or-miss guide to growth and fulfillment, by turns sketchy and inspirational.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-08-789210-8
Page Count: 72
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
SEEN & HEARD
A sweet final word from an actor who leaves a legacy of compassion and kindness.
The late actor offers a gentle guide for living with more purpose, love, and joy.
Mixing poetry, prescriptive challenges, and elements of memoir, Heche (1969-2022) delivers a narrative that is more encouraging workbook than life story. The author wants to share what she has discovered over the course of a life filled with abuse, advocacy, and uncanny turning points. Her greatest discovery? Love. “Open yourself up to love and transform kindness from a feeling you extend to those around you to actions that you perform for them,” she writes. “Only by caring can we open ourselves up to the universe, and only by opening up to the universe can we fully experience all the wonders that it holds, the greatest of which is love.” Throughout the occasionally overwrought text, Heche is heavy on the concept of care. She wants us to experience joy as she does, and she provides a road map for how to get there. Instead of slinking away from Hollywood and the ridicule that she endured there, Heche found the good and hung on, with Alec Baldwin and Harrison Ford starring as particularly shining knights in her story. Some readers may dismiss this material as vapid Hollywood stuff, but Heche’s perspective is an empathetic blend of Buddhism (minimize suffering), dialectical behavioral therapy (tolerating distress), Christianity (do unto others), and pre-Socratic philosophy (sufficient reason). “You’re not out to change the whole world, but to increase the levels of love and kindness in the world, drop by drop,” she writes. “Over time, these actions wear away the coldness, hate, and indifference around us as surely as water slowly wearing away stone.” Readers grieving her loss will take solace knowing that she lived her love-filled life on her own terms. Heche’s business and podcast partner, Heather Duffy, writes the epilogue, closing the book on a life well lived.
A sweet final word from an actor who leaves a legacy of compassion and kindness.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2023
ISBN: 9781627783316
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Viva Editions
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
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