A warmly reassuring and useful, if sometimes overly effusive, New Age guide to mindful fulfillment.
Feeling anxious, inert, and adrift? Time to reconnect with the Divine Feminine, argues this self-helper.
Hoem, a psychotherapist and life coach, addresses readers who feel beset by the world’s horrors and brutality, prospects of environmental catastrophe and nuclear war, and a denatured personal life divided among frenetic busyness, listless staring at screens, and addictions. Drawing on Hindu yogic philosophy and theosophical lore, she invokes a cosmic life force known variously as the Divine Mother, Mother Mary, Sophia, Quan Yin, Grandmother Spider Woman, Goddess Kundalini Shakti, and the Healer of the World. The author elaborates a therapeutic framework of “everyday soul dances,” meaning the practice of investing ordinary life tasks with a heightened awareness, sacredness, and benevolent purpose. Hoem grounds this approach in a discussion of Hindu concepts like karma, dharma, and chakras as well as her own principles of “Consecration, Constancy, Courage, and Contemplation.” She also lays out a number of concrete activities for readers to do, including dream interpreting, praying, chanting of mantras, meditating—she includes links to recorded meditation sessions on her website everydaysouldances.com—and ruminating and journaling on knotty questions like “What is your highest purpose?” The author writes with insight and empathy about the psychological discontents of daily life and provides down-to-earth, practical tips for dispelling them with everything from breathing exercises—“Next, exhale completely allowing the breath to release from the top to the middle to the bottom”—to the slow reform of habits. (She recommends picking a simple self-improvement goal and practicing it for 90 days.) Sometimes, though, Hoem’s advice takes on an esoteric and supernatural cast. (“Ask your guides, the Divine Mother, angels, and other ascended masters who support you to guide you.”) Her writing often has a mystical feel and cadence, especially when she is channeling the voice of the Divine Mother, whether in prose—“I Am both that which is and that which is not”—or verse. (“Take time to find Me. / Open. / I am here. / Always. / Forever. / I Am. / You are. / We are One.”) Sometimes these raptures can feel overdone or vaporous, but readers seeking uplift, inspiration, and motivation will find them here in spades.
A warmly reassuring and useful, if sometimes overly effusive, New Age guide to mindful fulfillment.Pub Date: Dec. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9822-3358-7
Page Count: 284
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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