A brief but detailed and thought-provoking handbook for spiritual development.
A concise, spiritual self-help guide that examines a complex web of human needs, beliefs, and behaviors.
In an introduction, retired businessman Landre states the two purposes of his text: to demonstrate the existence of “higher levels of consciousness” and to guide readers toward an understanding of their own level of spiritual awareness. To this end, he defines a wide range of 64 universal needs, based on those posited by psychologist A.H. Maslow in 1968, as well as five “phases of consciousness”: instinctive, emotional, rational, intuitive, and enlightened. The first four of these stages, the author asserts, people use to negotiate the tangle of human needs, while enlightenment, or the “Final Insight,” rises above such judgment and desire to attain the highest level of consciousness. Landre depicts the first four as a developmental progression: In the instinctive phase, people rely on instinct for survival in a world that they don’t control; in the emotional one, they begin to view the self in relation to others and observe the world as something they can change; the rational phase of awareness encompasses an increased sense of personal responsibility and reliance on “careful” thought; and the fourth phase transcends individuality in favor of a spiritual sense of unity with a “larger whole.” The remaining narrative focuses on identifying and evaluating individual needs and developing skills to fulfill them in order to progress to higher levels. Over the course of this guide, Landre’s writing is lucid and accessible, and he offers specific, easy-to-follow steps for readers who may wish to figure out where they stand among the stages and launch a “quest for enlightenment.” The work is firmly based in familiar tenets of Eastern spiritual thought and avoids vague mysticism, instead grounding its assertions in psychology. Nonspiritual readers, however, will likely take issue with some of the book’s statements, such as “The need for believing in a Divine Entity is universal.”
A brief but detailed and thought-provoking handbook for spiritual development.Pub Date: May 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-95-520515-3
Page Count: 102
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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