A brief, easy-to-follow grab bag of diet tips and New Age–style psychotherapeutics.
According to this self-help book, people struggling with depression should try a low-carb diet, proactive smiling, and marathon meditation sessions.
Altshuler describes treatments for depression that he’s gleaned from his psychiatric practice and from meditation gurus, with whom he studied in Nepal and Tibet. The most important one, he contends, is a low- to no-carb diet that he asserts will lower one’s insulin levels and one’s raise neurotransmitter levels, thus relieving depression, anxiety, and insomnia. He recommends an initial 24-hour zero-carb diet of meat, eggs, and fish to “JUMP START YOUR BRAIN!,” followed by a maintenance diet with small amounts of carbs, adjusted to daily stress levels. Altshuler’s other methods appear to be even easier; for example, he says that deliberately smiling for 10 minutes each day will lift one’s mood due to feedback loops between one’s facial muscles and neural circuitry. He offers simple deep-breathing exercises to loosen one’s muscles, and autohypnotic chants for relaxation, such as “I AM DOING EVERYTHING SLOWLY, SLOWLY, SLOWLY.” He also suggests a rudimentary meditation technique of sitting quietly in a chair for at least 30 minutes a day; those who do hourslong sessions, he says, can reach a “breaking point” that reorients them toward happiness and spiritual satisfaction. Altshuler backs up his ideas with anonymous testimonials; one patient, for example, says that he found that the regimen relieved her depression and anxiety, cleared up her irritable bowel syndrome, chronic fatigue, and fibromyalgia, and gave her psychic premonitions. Over the course of the book, the author writes in a lucid prose style, despite the occasional, distracting typo (“cabs” instead of “carbs”), and he lays out his techniques in a straightforward, practical fashion. That said, much of the book consists of blank workbook pages that allow readers to implement the author’s protocol by logging their daily food intake, meditative sitting periods, and moments of smiling, chanting, and deep-breathing, along with their mental states. The author’s blending of neurobiology with Eastern spiritualism won’t appeal to everyone, and many won’t be convinced of his methods’ efficacy. However, the latter are so easy and convenient that many will want to try them out.
A brief, easy-to-follow grab bag of diet tips and New Age–style psychotherapeutics. (Self-Help)Pub Date: Dec. 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-67998-191-3
Page Count: 239
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2020
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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