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
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
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