Uplifting advice for fellow seekers encouraged by self-help guidance.
An Australian career coach offers a set of principles for boosting self-worth and thwarting self-negating thoughts.
“I was born in England to middle-class Nigerian parents in the 1970s,” writes Nekvapil, who was a foster child in five different white families before she was 18. Many Nigerian families, she writes, fostered their children through white families, hoping to give them “the best opportunities in life.” From an early age, the author had to quash the self-defeating ideas about being a Black woman that society has thrust upon her. Initially trained as an actor, Nekvapil became a bakery entrepreneur before moving to Australia with her husband to start a family. She addresses honestly the kind of prejudice she has had to overcome as a Black woman, rejecting the instinct to apologize or make herself small and invisible. She emphasizes the necessity of shifting the paradigm from thinking that we must have external power over someone else to nurture an internal sense of power, and she sets out five “Power Principles,” which include presence, ownership, wisdom, equality, and responsibility. Considering each of these straightforward principles, Nekvapil offers letters from readers about their own stories. Most helpfully, after each section, the author poses questions that engage readers in active reflection—e.g., “What one action could you take today to practice presence?” “Who or what do you need to see to feel that you belong?” Finally, Nekvapil discusses the benefits of having real power, which could include the power of money, the power to lead, and the power of privilege. The final exercise is putting these many principles into action: “Practice owning your thoughts, your words, your voice, your power.” Influenced by the work of Elizabeth Gilbert, Martha Beck, and others, Nekvapil imparts how not to be afraid of power.
Uplifting advice for fellow seekers encouraged by self-help guidance.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9780143138020
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Penguin Life
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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