A sweeping and empathetic call for people to teach themselves how to relax.
A game plan for slowing down and taking breaks in a busy world.
In her nonfiction debut, entrepreneur Nguyen urges her readers to stop, take stock, and give themselves a break now and then. “If you’ve been beating yourself up most of your life, ask yourself this: What if you approached it differently?” she asks. “What if you gave yourself permission to be where you are, right now?” In these pages, she lays out several approaches to building self-esteem and relaxing the constant pressure of our internal critics, advising her readers to identify their own strengths and weaknesses in order to create a “North Star statement” for their lives that will reflect their own core values. In the face of modern society’s increasing demand for nonstop productivity, she advocates self-care and career breaks to help reset. The author herself left a high-pressure corporate job, and she relates stories of others who’ve taken much-needed breaks. “I see you,” she writes to such people. “You laugh off the memes of corporate America, of exhaustion and the cats clicking away at their computers … and slowly it all erodes your spirit and your soul.” In a series of well-designed and fast-paced chapters (complete with bullet-pointed “bite-size breaks”), Nguyen lays out an array of tactics designed to reclaim inner peace. She’s unfailingly upbeat and realistic, particularly when it comes to her advocacy of meditation; the author approaches this subject with plenty of experience-born advice for newcomers to the practice, assuring them that “depending on what you need and how much time you have, there is a conscious breathwork technique that can work for you.” She also champions such common sense measures as getting plenty of good regular sleep, reading fun books, learning a musical instrument, and cooking healthy meals—a broad enough spectrum to win over a great many overworked readers.
A sweeping and empathetic call for people to teach themselves how to relax.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2024
ISBN: 9781685557324
Page Count: 232
Publisher: The Collective Book Studio
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2024
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 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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