A pleasant and practical self-help guide to making mindful, deliberate decisions.
Leadership coach and debut author Wong offers five life-changing questions to help readers clarify their purpose.
The author, who’s worked with companies such as Salesforce and Facebook, presents a work that highlights five choices for improving one’s existence: “Even if your life is already pretty fantastic, I want even morefor you,” Wong writes. “I want you to wake up each morning excited to sink your teeth into life rather than feeling burdened by it.” To that end, the author structures her book in three parts—“The Power of Deliberate Choices,” “Discover the Life You Were Born To Live,” and “Making the Ultimate Choice.” She then describes the five essential choices that readers must make to achieve purpose—from “Choose to feel it out, not figure it out” to “Choose to know, not believe, your worth”—along with substeps to integrate these notions into one’s life, such as acting on “inspired thoughts.” Along the way, Wong offers examples from her work, including anonymized stories of clients whom she helped guide into dream professions; one pursued a career as a stand-up comedian, she says, because she “was set free by the simple realization that there was no legitimate reason not to go for it.” Over the course of this book, the author presents impressively revealing anecdotes from her personal life, too, including her struggles with an eating disorder. Overall, the book is a remarkably well-balanced affair, as it successfully juggles these true-life stories with findings from outside research, easy-to-follow activities, and clear applications, and it does it all in a charming, conversational tone. Throughout, Wong gracefully invites readers to explore their capacity for radical acceptance, self-awareness, and worthiness, and she effectively encourages readers to “Commit to knowing that you are already complete.”
A pleasant and practical self-help guide to making mindful, deliberate decisions.Pub Date: May 24, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-956072-02-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Braintrust Ink
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2022
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
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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