A helpful take on manifestation that’s hampered somewhat by a lack of organization.
Novo offers advice on how to overcome childhood trauma and create the life of one’s dreams.
This modern guide to healing is informed by “classic manifesting books” from the early 20th century, written by the likes of Napoleon Hill and Neville Goddard, and it’s aimed at people experiencing complex post-traumatic stress disorder. C-PTSD can be the result of chronic childhood trauma, notes the author, and to heal from it, people must change the “limiting beliefs” that they were taught by a “wounded narrator”—the inner voice that “kept [them] from being mentally obliterated.” Other books, such as Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score (2014), offer a more science-driven approach to somatic healing, but this one is propelled by the author’s personal convictions. The work includes behavioral practices, reflective questions, chapter-by-chapter goals and objectives, inspirational quotes by famous figures such as author Ursula K. Le Guin (“Truth is a matter of the imagination”), mantras such as “Time is plentiful,” and cultural touchstones that provide readers with actionable steps toward healing. The chapters follow a similar structure, but their organization can be frustrating. The first few repeatedly reference what readers can anticipate, but the book doesn’t offer any foundational information about the author until halfway through. One chapter, “Practice Recontextualizing,” is so good, though, it could be expanded into its own book; in it, Novo acknowledges that what keeps many people from working toward their goals isn’t a lack of willpower or ability, but poverty and disenfranchisement. The author boldly notes that if one is living in poverty, one must first “escape” it and “search for inspiration wherever you can”: “If you can work on achieving baseline stability while healing and pursuing your dreams, work on both in tandem,” the author advises. “If not, get to baseline first.”
A helpful take on manifestation that’s hampered somewhat by a lack of organization.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2026
ISBN: 9798218918828
Page Count: 306
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2026
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
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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