A kindly and crystal-clear program of advice for managing money.
A no-nonsense and comprehensive guide to achieving financial harmony.
The latest from podcaster, debt adviser, and professional speaker Kelly, the author of Get the Hell Out of Debt (2021), revolves around a central conceit that one should have “a complete willingness to be vulnerable…when it comes to your money…whether you are solo, shacked up, or signed-on-the-dotted-lined.” She presents readers with a barrage of tests they may take in order to assess not only their financial state, but also their financial frame of mind, which she assigns to a particular “block”: the Lack Block (“I tend to react to financial stress instead of anticipating or dissipating it”), the Worthiness Block (“I lack confidence when it comes to money and other areas of my life”), the Stress Block (“I constantly think about money or the lack thereof”), which is probably the most heavily populated block, and a few others. In Kelly’s view, it’s the misalignment between blocks—romantic partners “living” in different financial neighborhoods, as it were—that gives rise to the sort of financial stress she describes in these pages, and she carefully lays out how to bring these neighborhoods together. Her tone throughout is funny and slangy, with pop-culture references and humorous asides, as when she recalls an embarrassing moment involving the 1997 horror film Anaconda while making a point about giving one’s partner space to grow and change. She’s keenly aware that the subject of money is inherently worrying, so she wisely keeps her tone correspondingly light. Nonetheless, there’s a refreshingly hard-edged clarity to much of her advice, and a great deal of it will be useful even to people who aren’t in committed relationships. As she points out, her book isn't meant to defend or attack such commitment but to help readers find a sense of financial peace.
A kindly and crystal-clear program of advice for managing money.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781637587799
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
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
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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