We should all be in such fine form in our 10th decade. Viorst is as charming, and smart, as ever.
The great humorist, poet, and observer of life passages turns her attention to the “Final Fifth” of life.
Readers just a bit younger than Viorst, who is now 94, may remember growing up with their parents’ copies of It’s Hard To Be Hip Over Thirty and People and Other Aggravations, early collections of Viorst’s light poetry. Along with 14 books for adults, Viorst has authored dozens of children’s books, among them Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. The new book completes the adult series and opens with the poem she meant to give her husband Milton for Valentine’s Day 2023; he died a matter of weeks before. This leads her into a discussion of dating and romance at her RC (retirement community) and a poem called “Grow Old Along With Me and My Home Health Aide,” and then a last poem for Milton: “Stop Being Dead.” Between the poems are mordant observations and anecdotes involving friends and associates from the RC, including their views on the possibility of an afterlife. She herself believes such beliefs are what the shrinks call “terror management.” She wasn’t here before, and she won’t be here after. “Do I mind? Do I mind? You bet your sweet ass I mind.” Readers well before the Final Fifth will find plenty to relate to here. You don’t have to be much past 60 to notice that as one grows older, it seems much easier to get one’s feelings hurt, to feel passed over or left out. The idea of marginalization is nothing new, but only Viorst phrases it directly enough to elicit sudden tears. And no one of any age should miss “A Jewish Widow’s Country-Western Love Song.” Always both gracious and culturally acute, she acknowledges the wisdom and saving grace of two favorite poets, Jack Gilbert and Adam Zagajewski.
We should all be in such fine form in our 10th decade. Viorst is as charming, and smart, as ever.Pub Date: April 1, 2025
ISBN: 9781668068014
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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
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
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