A welcome compendium of self-help guidance, drawn from centuries of sages.
Don’t worry, be happy.
Philosophy developed as a discipline to reason out the pathways to a good life: What is the nature of pleasure, are there decisions that are right regardless of the contexts, how can we balance individual desire with communal needs? Ruiz, who teaches philosophy at the University of Córdoba in Spain, offers a world tour of philosophers who asked such questions and whose answers can inform our own modern lives. We attain these goals, Ruiz says, through critical thinking: a rational process of balancing doubt and belief, and a way of living with good judgment and acceptance. Much of this book’s advice will seem unchallenging to a readership reared on decades of self-help manuals. “To be happy, we must live calmly and serenely, at peace with our fellow human beings, but most of all, with ourselves,” the author writes. “To feel is to become aware, to be able to do what, according to Socrates and the Oracle of Delphi, was the most difficult act of wisdom there is: to know oneself.” And: “Just remember that the habit of comparing yourself with others can be harmful and rarely if ever brings joy into your life.” Everyone from Plato and Bertrand Russell to Steve Jobs makes an appearance here, and, while there’s little new to add to our attempts to be and to do good, there is a comforting familiarity to the book’s moral chestnuts. “True happiness,” Ruiz writes, “is something that’s learned, and if we learn it well, it will eventually become a way of being.” If we learn anything from this book, it will be to return to the philosophers who taught their readers to find solace in the simple.
A welcome compendium of self-help guidance, drawn from centuries of sages.Pub Date: May 26, 2026
ISBN: 9798895150986
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Diversion Books
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2026
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
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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