Warm encouragement for healing troubled relationships.
A road map toward a better marriage.
The Gottmans, couples therapists and founders of the Gottman Institute to research and support healthy relationships, draw on their experience studying more than 40,000 couples to offer “a bite-sized, seven-day action plan” for taking a marriage in a new direction. From their work with newly partnered same-sex couples, long-married pairs with children and grandchildren, partners overwhelmed by busy careers and young children, couples trapped in poverty, and even some experiencing “mild to moderate domestic violence, where both partners can become violent during an escalated conflict, but no injuries are inflicted and both want to change,” the authors have devised simple practices designed to teach partners how to relate to each other in productive ways. They invented their strategies, many of which are fairly obvious, in response to their clients’ problems and by observing the behavior of happy couples. “What we see in happy, thriving relationships,” they write, “is that people do genuinely admire each other for all the wonderful qualities they each possess, and when it comes to the inevitable not-so-wonderful qualities, they’re able to have compassion for each other’s enduring vulnerabilities.” They identify attitudes they call “the Four Horsemen—criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling,” which act as destructive forces. They can be overcome, however, through such practices as checking in with your partner for 10 minutes each day, expressing gratitude, giving genuine compliments, and, simply, touching. It’s also vital to express one’s needs and not expect a partner to be a mind reader: “We all have needs. We all have valid desires. But we don’t say them.” For couples who seem to be living parallel lives, roommates rather than loving partners, they recommend setting aside a weekly date night. “The ‘sex-starved marriage,’ they’ve observed, “really isn’t only about sex, fundamentally. It’s one where people have, over time, shut down all forms of openness: to sensuality, to adventure, to play and silliness, to learning together.”
Warm encouragement for healing troubled relationships.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-143-13663-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Penguin Life
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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