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
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
A sweet final word from an actor who leaves a legacy of compassion and kindness.
The late actor offers a gentle guide for living with more purpose, love, and joy.
Mixing poetry, prescriptive challenges, and elements of memoir, Heche (1969-2022) delivers a narrative that is more encouraging workbook than life story. The author wants to share what she has discovered over the course of a life filled with abuse, advocacy, and uncanny turning points. Her greatest discovery? Love. “Open yourself up to love and transform kindness from a feeling you extend to those around you to actions that you perform for them,” she writes. “Only by caring can we open ourselves up to the universe, and only by opening up to the universe can we fully experience all the wonders that it holds, the greatest of which is love.” Throughout the occasionally overwrought text, Heche is heavy on the concept of care. She wants us to experience joy as she does, and she provides a road map for how to get there. Instead of slinking away from Hollywood and the ridicule that she endured there, Heche found the good and hung on, with Alec Baldwin and Harrison Ford starring as particularly shining knights in her story. Some readers may dismiss this material as vapid Hollywood stuff, but Heche’s perspective is an empathetic blend of Buddhism (minimize suffering), dialectical behavioral therapy (tolerating distress), Christianity (do unto others), and pre-Socratic philosophy (sufficient reason). “You’re not out to change the whole world, but to increase the levels of love and kindness in the world, drop by drop,” she writes. “Over time, these actions wear away the coldness, hate, and indifference around us as surely as water slowly wearing away stone.” Readers grieving her loss will take solace knowing that she lived her love-filled life on her own terms. Heche’s business and podcast partner, Heather Duffy, writes the epilogue, closing the book on a life well lived.
A sweet final word from an actor who leaves a legacy of compassion and kindness.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2023
ISBN: 9781627783316
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Viva Editions
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
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