A sensitive and hands-on approach to navigating life after running.
Finding a new way to be an athlete after you can’t run anymore.
There are people who jog in their local turkey trot every year. And then there are runners: people of all shapes and sizes who meticulously log their daily runs, race in half-marathons and marathons throughout the year, and who find community with other runners. But what happens when, due to injury or age, you can’t run anymore? How do you rebuild your identity as an athlete? How do you stay active when other sports pale in comparison? And how do you battle envy when your runner friends talk excitedly about their next race? That’s what McDowell, co-founder of the company Another Mother Runner and author of several books on running, aimed to find out. She stopped running in 2020 due to years of stress fractures, hip strains, and other injuries. Part therapy, part self-help, part guidebook, this book is a primer on how to gracefully transition into your next chapter as an athlete. The author talks about why running is so essential to runners, interviewing experts such as sports psychologist Kim Dawson, who says, “Runners pride themselves on the fact that not many people can do it. And that it’s the hardest, most pure sport. If it’s the purest thing in your life, it’s also going to be the hardest to leave.” McDowell also gives guidelines on the transition, such as “don’t go more than 48 hours without a good sweat” and to create two music playlists: one of sad songs, good for a cathartic cry, and another upbeat and motivational playlist to “make you feel powerful and strong.” Although this book could benefit all runners, McDowell seems to target female runners. She tells the stories of several dozen women, ranging from their 30s to their 60s, on how running changed them and what they do now to get the endorphins flowing.
A sensitive and hands-on approach to navigating life after running.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2026
ISBN: 9780306837357
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Balance/Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
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
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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