A compassionate, practical, and useful series of approaches for dealing with pet loss.
A debut guide focuses on healing after the loss of a beloved pet.
Despite the fact that tens of millions of Americans own at least one pet, the reaction of a great many people to the loss of a furry friend is one of dismissal: “It was only a dog” or “Just get another one.” In her book, Farage-Smith expresses gentle frustration with such condescension. “Our society needs to recognize and honor this type of loss,” she writes, “because it can be so devastating and it affects so many people.” The author—an educator, mental health counselor, and founder of the Rochester Center for Pet Grief and Loss—describes the myriad faces of this kind of loss and outlines strategies and mindsets that may help readers get through it. She goes over the long history of the human-pet bond, recounting the many documented physical and psychological benefits of the relationship. Then she moves to the bulk of her book and its strongest sections, in which she dissects different kinds of grief. They range from the “anticipatory” kind that can arise when people are caring for an older or terminally ill pet to the “ambiguous” or “disenfranchised” type, when, for instance, an owner is forced to part ways with an animal companion and must experience grief without death. The classic stages of that grief are likewise examined, and throughout the guide, Farage-Smith deftly employs the warm, compassionate prose tone that readers enduring this type of loss will most appreciate. Among other things, she strongly advocates journaling to work out the intense feelings involved, but she always positions herself as the audience’s biggest champion. “The process of forgiving yourself can begin by accepting what happened, learning and growing from the experience, and allowing yourself to move forward,” she writes. “Forgiveness is a choice.” Readers who have experienced the trauma of pet loss will deeply appreciate the valuable wisdom in these pages.
A compassionate, practical, and useful series of approaches for dealing with pet loss.Pub Date: June 4, 2024
ISBN: 9781647426767
Page Count: 224
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
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 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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