For spiritual seekers, a loosely inspirational invitation to reconsider the role of poetry in life.
A guide to finding meaning and connection through poetry.
Poet and historian Hecht, author of Doubt and The Happiness Myth, launches an ambitious investigation into how spiritually inclined nonbelievers seeking a meaningful alternative to organized religion’s dogma can find it in poetry. “Many of us who are happy to live outside religion still suffer from a lack of things religion gives its members,” writes the author. “It seems to me the remedy to this suffering is a shift in the way we think about ritual and the poetry of our lives.” In laying out the possibilities, she writes, “I want to tempt you to compile a clutch of poems for holidays, events, practices, and emergencies. I’ll show you how to gather and get to know them, how to take them into your daily life and your heart.” Throughout 20 thematically focused chapters—e.g., “On Decisions,” “On Weddings,” “On Coming-of-Age”—Hecht shares anecdotal stories from a wide variety of individuals. As each reflects on their specific struggles or dissatisfaction, the author offers a particular poem as a balm. Though somewhat random, Hecht’s poetry selection is expansive, ranging across centuries and cultures. Among the dozens of poets she enlists are Rumi, Rilke, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Frost, Pablo Neruda, Maya Angelou, and Joy Harjo. Hecht’s premise is thought-provoking and intriguing, and the book will appeal to avid readers of Elizabeth Gilbert, Julia Cameron, Anne Lamott, and similar authors. However, Hecht’s writing often lacks those writers’ grounded, open-hearted clarity, and the text, though studded with insightful commentary, often wavers unevenly between conversational guidance and abstruse rumination. “I think if we want to know ourselves and the world we are floating in, we have to risk swimming out past the breaking waves,” she writes. “It’s deep out there, but to switch metaphors, the task is not to solve anything, but to find out what happens when we try to live the questions.”
For spiritual seekers, a loosely inspirational invitation to reconsider the role of poetry in life.Pub Date: March 7, 2023
ISBN: 9780374292744
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
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