Poetry can’t produce a lost parent, but as this collection demonstrates, it can leave a meaningful legacy behind.
After a long career in the U.S. space and national defense programs, a debut author turns to poetry.
This slim volume comes with a brief introduction from McDonald explaining the dedication to friends and family. Indeed, it makes a thoughtful chronicle of a full life and will be treasured as such. From the banks of a boyhood creek in Mississippi to the changing seasons in Colorado, the sections play out their chronologies in steadfast rhyming quatrains. Many of the subjects are familiar to poetry fans—youth, wisdom, love, farewells. Much of the imagery is recognizable too, as in the opening lines of “Springtime,” where “Green walks slowly across the land, / Stamping brown into the sand.” Though it’s famously difficult to treat seasonal subjects freshly, this springtime scene includes a vision of lightning and thunder that inspires the speaker toward a strong metaphor to close the poem. “A new genre has claimed the land,” he asserts, putting a signature stamp on the old book-of-nature idea. The handful of romantic poems, too, draw on much-deployed tropes of holding the loved one close to the heart despite distance. But the depth of true love adds gravity to simple lines like these, from “Don’t Leave Me Alone”: “Today my heart trembles with fear, / Knowing you may not always be near.” Perfect rhyme seems just right in this case, for articulating how terrible it will be to go on living after the beloved departs, toiling onward in the wake of loss. The poet’s involvement in the space mission, beginning in 1964 with the Apollo program, occasions a long piece on this “Greatest Adventure,” hailing those who depart in a “chariot of fire” toward the much imagined “lunar path.” The title of the book connects to this “greatest thrill imaginable” but originates in McDonald’s self-described wanderlust to search for his father, killed during World War II, when the author was age 5. In boyhood dreams, he searched for his father, whose body was never found.
Poetry can’t produce a lost parent, but as this collection demonstrates, it can leave a meaningful legacy behind.Pub Date: June 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5434-3093-6
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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