A warm, valuable, and empathetic guide to forging personal alignments that will rejuvenate lives.
A debut manual offers a blueprint for creating new patterns in work and life.
Keller Wood opens her book by discussing an extremely relevant topic in 21st-century America: discovering the right work-life balance. She suggests that this balance is not only impossible to find, but also illusory—either people are ignoring work-related things they should be doing, or they’re neglecting their lives in favor of their jobs, particularly when their occupations involve helping others. But “having work that is of service to the world,” Keller Wood writes, “does not require a life of monastic self-sacrifice.” The way she proposes to avoid these kinds of problems is to abandon the idea of balance and instead concentrate on “alignment.” The key to this concept is the trick of seeing life as a mosaic whose innumerable little pieces will realign themselves in response to changes in employment, family, health, and other factors. Each piece supports the others and gives the mosaic long-term durability. Drawing on her experience in the Montessori school of teaching, Keller Wood stresses this flexibility and the “interleaving” (“resting from one kind of work” and switching to another) that’s characteristic of the educational method. The author asks readers: “If your body is weary from physical work, is there a more abstract problem you could puzzle over?” Keller Wood never avoids the “hard truth” that all the pieces of the mosaic she describes are temporary. Nonetheless, she writes with grace and genuine enthusiasm about her conviction that her readers can overcome the situation where “we have a lot on our plate, but we’re feeling less connected to the meaning behind it” and discover personal alignments that will improve their lives. Her lively book is full of vivid narrative examples drawn from her own life and the experiences of others as well as helpful writing exercises and “reflection questions” designed to make her less of a teacher and more of a Montessori-style “guide.” Teachers at all levels will consider the book useful, and harried, overworked readers will find it a welcome call to slow down and take stock.
A warm, valuable, and empathetic guide to forging personal alignments that will rejuvenate lives.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781774584859
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Page Two
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2025
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 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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
