A book that offers pertinent and practical connection-building advice in an easily digestible format.
Chaleff presents a thoughtful guide on how to forge new connections and improve existing ones.
Human connection is fundamental to survival, so it’s vital to know how to build these meaningful and necessary bonds. In this book, the author presents readers with a “playbook” for how to navigate connections in their everyday lives. He uses personal anecdotes and concrete and familiar real-world examples to explain his ideas, resulting in a straightforward read. The book is organized around six distinct concepts, each contained in its own section: “The Essential Conditions for Connection,” “Connection Killers,” “Opening the Door to Connection,” “Creating Context for Deepening Connection,” “Advanced Skills for Deepening Connection,” and “Navigating Tricky Connections.” Although these sections build on one another as the book goes on, readers can easily skip around and read what piques their interest. At the end of each section, Chaleff features exercises that allow readers to apply what they’ve just learned to their own lives; those who complete these are likely to get the most out of this book. (They may also explore chapter-recap videos, accessible via QR codes.) Chaleff's clear love of formulas, coupled with his conversational storytelling tone, has the effect of inviting readers into his discussions, which never feel like lectures. As he puts it, the book’s core idea is that “If we can’t see how we create barriers between ourselves and others, we have no way of dealing with those barriers….Love, compassion, and connection…are our natural state when we remove the barriers that prevent us from living in that state.” In a world that’s slowly emerging from the Covid-19 pandemic, during which many people struggled with building and maintaining relationships, this book is a must-read.
A book that offers pertinent and practical connection-building advice in an easily digestible format.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9798988572015
Page Count: 282
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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