While a distressing marriage takes center stage, this account offers refreshing takes on starting over.
A memoir recounts a difficult marriage and a woman’s subsequent empowerment through faith.
In 1972, 27-year-old Kurth was reeling from her first divorce in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She then met a man named Jim. There were early warning signs of their incompatibility, like his irrational and overly harsh reactions to food, but the two forged ahead in marriage. As Jim saw his engineering career expand, the author found work as a substitute teacher, a weaver, an interior designer, and eventually a writer. Despite their mutual joy as parents, Jim and Kurth’s marriage deteriorated slowly into increasingly bitter exchanges and signs of his disrespect. The couple eventually moved to California and then back to the author’s home state of Oregon, where they would build their dream home, dubbed “What-a-View.” But Jim’s pattern of unpredictable moods and lack of interest left Kurth wanting to be with a “real man, not like the grown child to whom” she was married. The author goes into vivid detail about every fight and counseling session before their 25-year marriage came to a slow and painful end, leaving the author to seek strength in her Christian faith as she built a new life for herself. Even though Jim’s individual aggressions are never more threatening than cruel reactions to an empty bag of nuts or offhand comments, Kurth delves deep into the emotional state of her household, creating an admirable portrait of how toxic atmospheres have real mental and physical consequences. Nonetheless, the book’s first section can be tedious—at times, it feels like a laundry list of Jim’s faults. More intriguing is the author’s post-divorce evolution on the Christian dating scene. Surrounded by other “beautiful, intelligent women of God” affected by bad marriages, Kurth embraced a range of conservative and liberal schools of Christian thought that will surely speak to readers also questioning what they really want.
While a distressing marriage takes center stage, this account offers refreshing takes on starting over.Pub Date: March 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63195-150-3
Page Count: 282
Publisher: Morgan James Faith
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.
Memories and life lessons inspired by the author’s mother, who was murdered in 2021.
“Neither my mother nor I knew that her last text to me would be the words ‘Think you’ll be happy,’ ” Avant writes, "but it is fitting that she left me with a mantra for resiliency.” The author, a filmmaker and former U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas, begins her first book on the night she learned her mother, Jacqueline Avant, had been fatally shot during a home invasion. “One of my first thoughts,” she writes, “was, ‘Oh God, please don’t let me hate this man. Give me the strength not to hate him.’ ” Daughter of Clarence Avant, known as the “Black Godfather” due to his work as a pioneering music executive, the author describes growing up “in a house that had a revolving door of famous people,” from Ella Fitzgerald to Muhammad Ali. “I don’t take for granted anything I have achieved in my life as a Black American woman,” writes Avant. “And I recognize my unique upbringing…..I was taught to honor our past and pay forward our fruits.” The book, which is occasionally repetitive, includes tributes to her mother from figures like Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton, but the narrative core is the author’s direct, faith-based, unwaveringly positive messages to readers—e.g., “I don’t want to carry the sadness and anger I have toward the man who did this to my mother…so I’m worshiping God amid the worst storm imaginable”; "Success and feeling good are contagious. I’m all about positive contagious vibrations!” Avant frequently quotes Bible verses, and the bulk of the text reflects the spirit of her daily prayer “that everything is in divine order.” Imploring readers to practice proactive behavior, she writes, “We have to always find the blessing, to be the blessing.”
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780063304413
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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
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