An earnest self-help manual that treads overly familiar ground.
Life coachand entrepreneurHamilton-Guarino offers a motivational guide for achieving success.
Hamilton-Guarino, the founder of the Best Ever You Network—which produces motivational guidebooks, podcasts, and magazines—aims to inspire readers to “Create awesomeness within” in this book. She begins with her own family’s rags-to-riches-to-rags-again story, which led to her decision to quit her jobin the finance sector and create the Best Ever You brand. Her strategies for success fall into three categories (“Visualize Your Success,” “Actualize Your Success,” and “Amplify Your Success”) and consist of 10 factors, including imagining what success looks like; believing in oneself; focusing one’s vision and energy; taking action toward achieving one’s goal; and six others, ending with toasting one’s success. Hamilton-Guarino illustrates her concepts with real-life anecdotes about successful people, such as Jesse Cole and Emily Cole (the founders of the exhibition baseball team, the Savannah Bananas) and Georgetown University baseball head coach Edwin Thompson. A recurring “Stories from the Heart” section features first-person accounts by others with impressive achievements, and “Points to Ponder” and journal prompts provide encouraging thought exercises. Hamilton-Guarino’s most notable contribution is her broadening of the definition of success; rather than using “conventional measurements such as data or the dollars in your bank account,” she asserts, one can see success “reflected in the smiles that brighten our faces and the peace that settles in our hearts.” Readers looking for an introduction to basic self-help ideas will find that this book does the job. However, those who are already familiar with the genre may feel that much of the advice draws on clichés, such as “Reach for the stars!” and “Believe in yourself.” Other encouragements, such as “Live your superpowers,” may strike some readers as saccharine. The text also suffers from excessive verbosity at times: “Success to me is in the relationships you have, the bonds you create, the network, and collaborations, and treating everyone you encounter with a sense of grace, compassion, elegance, kindness, peace, and genuine interest.”
An earnest self-help manual that treads overly familiar ground.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780757324802
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Health Communications Inc.
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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