A wide-ranging and powerfully optimistic look at how individuals can change their lives.
A debut guide offers a motivational call for people to stop being victims of circumstance.
Adams opens her work with the promise that it’s “a book that teaches you how to tap into the limitless power that resides within, even when circumstances or other people present barriers outside of your control.” In response to the question “Who are you?” the author maintains that “choosing to be the answer is more important than finding it.” Nobody else in the world is you, she writes, and that is the source of your power. She points out that this can often be obscured by the daily realities her readers face. When the “locus of control” is external to ourselves, she asserts, it fosters the belief that both good and bad things are in the power of others and that we have no way to do anything about it. Citing a wide array of studies and experts, Adams lays out an elaborate refutation of this idea. She draws on figures as dissimilar as primatologist Michael Tomasello, engineer Destin Sandlin, and neuroanatomist (and author of 2009’s My Stroke of Insight) Jill Taylor to paint a far more complex and nuanced picture of how individuals form and reinforce their self-images. Throughout, the author is firmly, realistically encouraging, always aware of human fallibilities even while she’s championing inner strength. “The information we use from our past provides a snapshot in ways that aren’t necessarily knowing,” she writes, “and that’s okay.” All our lives, she points out, we go through the process of discovering and rediscovering ourselves and display a tendency to overestimate our knowledge. But she winningly, convincingly insists that rediscovering ourselves can go hand in hand with reinventing ourselves independent of the naysayers we may have around us. It’s a simple and salutary message, something that will doubtless be very galvanizing for many of her readers.
A wide-ranging and powerfully optimistic look at how individuals can change their lives.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2022
ISBN: 9798885045698
Page Count: 194
Publisher: New Degree Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2022
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
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
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