An insightful, accessible guide to feeling good by doing good.
Ideas and exercises for finding stability and meaning in a divisive, destabilizing world.
In the wild year that was 2020, Bryant looked around and realized that Americans were deeply divided. Curious about what happened and how we might realign ourselves, the author started doing the research that would become this book. Bryant trained as a sociologist, but she also has a wealth of experience creating resources used in elementary and secondary social and emotional learning curricula around the world. Part 1 covers working on oneself: fostering self-respect, maintaining intellectual flexibility, learning from negative emotions, and developing other skills that promote lasting happiness. In Part 2, we’re invited to consider that how we treat others affects our own well-being. She describes how people have evolved to cooperate—to give up some personal freedoms in exchange for the benefits of living in a society—and looks at the ways we can enhance our lives by seeking community. Bryant builds upon the first two sections in Part 3, where she explores belief systems spanning the globe and thousands of years of history looking for core moral principles. Each chapter ends with journal prompts—questions like “Have you ever changed a behavior or created a new habit? How did you go about it?” Along the way, Bryant draws from a wide array of resources, from the work of contemporary happiness researchers and evolutionary biologists to Thomas Paine and Confucius. An attempt to address “identity politics,” however, offers a simplistic critique: “Real injustices have happened, and people are reasonable to want that to be acknowledged and corrected. But if the goal is truly to reach our society’s ideals for equality and fairness, we need a different approach that doesn’t wrap people’s identities in a shared sense of suffering.” In its entirety, this is a comprehensive program for creating a healthy culture by creating a healthy self, but Bryant offers an excellent annotated index in case readers need a quick hit of wisdom or a refresher course on a particular topic. And anyone who wants to go deeper can find her sources in the “Notes” section at the end of the book.
An insightful, accessible guide to feeling good by doing good.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2022
ISBN: 9780984905669
Page Count: 337
Publisher: LoveWell Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.
An experimental, illustrated essay collection that questions neurotypical definitions of what is normal.
From a young age, writer and comedian Myers has been different. In addition to coping with obsessive compulsive disorder and panic attacks, she struggled to read basic social cues. During a round of seven minutes in heaven—a game in which two players spend seven minutes in a closet and are expected to kiss—Myers misread the romantic advances of her best friend and longtime crush, Marley. In Paris, she accidentally invited a sex worker to join her friends for “board games and beer,” thinking he was simply a random stranger who happened to be hitting on her. In community college, a stranger’s request for a pen spiraled her into a panic attack but resulted in a tentative friendship. When the author moved to Australia, she began taking notes on her colleagues in an effort to know them better. As the author says to her co-worker, Tabitha, “there are unspoken social contracts within a workplace that—by some miracle—everyone else already understands, and I don’t….When things Go Without Saying, they Never Get Said, and sometimes people need you to Say Those Things So They Understand What The Hell Is Going On.” At its best, Myers’ prose is vulnerable and humorous, capturing characterization in small but consequential life moments, and her illustrations beautifully complement the text. Unfortunately, the author’s tendency toward unnecessary capitalization and experimental forms is often unsuccessful, breaking the book’s otherwise steady rhythm.
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063381308
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
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
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