A moving, if sometimes overly chatty, story of one man’s journey toward renewal.
A former NFL athletic trainer and current psychology professor offers his own psychological approach to the strategy of recovery.
“Dysfunction underlies the insidious nature of addiction,” Reese writes in this memoir and self-help book. “Learning to identify dysfunction is a necessary step in maintaining recovery.” The first section of Reese’s book is devoted to excavating his own troubled upbringing, which, according to him, laid the groundwork for the heavy drinking that he did during his 25 years working for the Buffalo Bills and New York Jets. This section’s climax, in which Reese hit bottom and entered treatment, will be familiar to regular readers of recovery literature or veterans of the recovery experience. This segues to the book’s second section, in which the author narrates his recovery journey through the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and his acquisition of a master’s degree and a doctorate in psychology. In the concluding section, he describes what he calls “the 13th step,” stressing that there should be more to addiction recovery than simply maintaining sobriety; it’s also important to thrive, he asserts. Reese is an engaging narrator, and each section of his book can effectively be read as self-contained, separate entities. However, they don’t all work equally well. The predominantly autobiographical sections tend to get cluttered with details and figures from his past (“Nick the Knife stormed into my office with Cal in tow and informed me that he had been on the phone to Mr. Hess and needed to know the results of my inventory”), but his storytelling is earnest and passionate. The section on recovery is shot through with hard-won, wry humor as readers witness his initial attempts to be “the best recovering alcoholic ever.” The book’s most gripping segments, though, are its most theoretical ones, toward the end, when Reese distills the lessons he’s learned and expresses a sense of joy in a way that one rarely finds in books about addiction.
A moving, if sometimes overly chatty, story of one man’s journey toward renewal.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5246-9769-3
Page Count: 446
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 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
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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