A straightforward manual that may offer valuable tips for youth willing to listen.
Lancaster distills four decades of mentorship, social work, and familiarity with the juvenile justice system into a guide with timeless advice for 10- to 13-year-old boys—and the adults raising them.
The author—who once worked as a probation officer for youth in Los Angeles, and later as director of the county’s juvenile justice department—sets out 10 core attributes that he says that boys need to flourish, involving increasing physical activity, increasing emotional intelligence, showing leadership, and having faith (religious or otherwise). Lancaster then outlines incremental, actionable steps that boys can take to build “super performance confidence” based on these ideas. Each chapter is divided into sections “for the boys,” “for the parents,” and sometimes “for teachers,” with an emphasis on shared accountability and small, celebratory ways of marking one’s progress. The book opens with a frank diagnosis of the challenges boys face today, and unlike most contemporary self-help books, it doesn’t dwell on cellphones. Instead, it aims directly for issues that excessive screen use can reveal: increasing hostility, disengagement, and emotional disarray. Whether this approach is effective will depend on each reader and their specific life situation. However, Lancaster’s upbeat, wholesome attitude and generosity are broadly appealing. He blends old-school values and easy-to-use point systems to encourage reflection, movement, gratitude, and structure, coaching boys on such actions as managing screen time, getting enough sleep, and journaling with an aim of self-understanding. The work is grounded in lived experience and an overall sense of love, rather than abstract psychology. Its advice strives to be immediately useful and often seems easy to implement. Stylistically, Lancaster leans into wholesome metaphors about sports and other topics, which work because they’re timeless, not trendy. As a result, the prose sometimes borders on quaint, but the book’s charm lies in its unselfconscious warmth and moral compass. For any parent willing to sit down with their son and go through it, chapter by chapter, this book may offer a meaningful blueprint for building confidence and character.
A straightforward manual that may offer valuable tips for youth willing to listen.Pub Date: yesterday
ISBN: 9798998935220
Page Count: 158
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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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