A heartfelt and holistic but diffuse and scattershot program for improving your life.
An inspirational guide offers readers advice on taking control of their destinies.
According to Pat, humanity has an integral role to play in the balance of the universe’s energy. That energy sprang into being during the Big Bang, originally assuming the simple, primitive forms of hydrogen but eventually evolving into humankind. “Humanity is an inseparable element of this energy system and is subject to all the laws that govern it,” the author writes. “There is no way out of the Energy System of the Universe; let us call it the Spiritual Energy of the Universe.” In Pat’s conception, the cosmos is in a state of perfect harmony, “an infinite vastness of energy in a state of absolute and perfect balance.” The preservation of that harmony is the guiding principle of all living things, or should be. Humans, he maintains, are the only creatures in this system that possess free will and have the choice either to live in accordance with the laws of the Spiritual Energy of the Universe or to follow their own paths in opposition to these rules, thereby inviting sadness and disappointment. In outlining the various precepts that will help readers to align their lives according to this Spiritual Energy, the author touches on many aspects of life—and death. “Do not fear death,” he advises. “Fear of dying is the first and most important source of negative energy.”
Pat often dispenses sound advice in this ambitious manual, translated from the Polishby Pagett and Oszmianska-Pagett. The author reassures his readers that they don’t always have to be cheerful, for instance—it’s perfectly OK to just yield to a bad day rather than waste energy on fighting it. All people have the right to do what they think is right; the author also tells his readers that they aren’t obliged to react to everything. Such worry-reducing sentiments are comforting, but some of Pat’s assertions are either contradictory or questionable. “Nobody has responsibility for your life other than you,” he writes at one point. At another point, he asserts: “Your destiny depends on your own thoughts,” a statement that will be puzzling to anybody who has ever survived a natural disaster, a dire illness, or even the loss of a job. At other times, he resorts to the kinds of “deep thought” aphorisms that too often fill guides of this type, things like “Would mountains exist if it wasn’t for the valleys?” He attempts to short-circuit any criticism by warning his readers: “Don’t intellectualize or analyze the words in this book.” But authors don’t write books in order for readers to ignore them. Still, Pat delivers several straightforward, useful truisms about the value of blazing your own trail and following your heart when it comes to charting your future. He urges his readers to fill their lives with love and to act only out of love when possible—clear and worthwhile advice. But the audience will have to wade through quite a bit of soup to find those tantalizing croutons.
A heartfelt and holistic but diffuse and scattershot program for improving your life.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-69890-826-7
Page Count: 201
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 18, 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 pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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