A book every dog lover will cherish, celebrating the unbreakable bond of canine and human.
An elegant, heartfelt meditation on life with a beloved dog.
“Getting a dog means catching hold of a creature who’s only passing through, committing to a full life that’s bound to be happy, inevitably sad, and in no way sparing.” Former gym teacher and mountaineer Sapin-Defour, whose memoir was a surprise hit in France in 2023, begins with the inescapable fact of death. Having lost one dog, heartbroken, Sapin-Defour spots an ad in a provincial paper announcing the availability of a litter of Bernese Mountain Dogs, overcomes all sorts of internal objections, and then makes a 200-kilometer trip to a remote village to have a look. “Dog people swear it’s the dog that chooses you and not the other way around,” he recounts. “The whole idea is nonsense.” Yet, sure enough, a beautiful puppy steps out of the swirl and selects him. The French being a systematic people, their version of the Kennel Club had decreed that puppies born in 2003 should have a name that begins with the letter U, and so Sapin-Defour chooses Ubac, “a term for a north-facing slope,” speaking perfectly to the puppy’s alpine origins and Sapin-Defour’s passions. Training the puppy is easy enough, though in a sense, as the author notes, Ubac is really training him how to understand a different reality: “I’ll never tire of studying his vision of the world to remind myself that my own is just one of many options.” Though the breed doesn’t live long—thus the meditation on death—Ubac enjoys 14 years of Sapin-Defour’s companionship, and vice versa. His death isn’t tragic as such, but the author’s account of it is quite moving, as is his thought that with every dog he pets henceforth he’ll really be petting two: “Perhaps one of them will pass on a message.”
A book every dog lover will cherish, celebrating the unbreakable bond of canine and human.Pub Date: July 15, 2025
ISBN: 9781668088265
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Summit/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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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