An exuberant life story written with humor, panache, and heart.
A quest for money clashes with the yearning for creative fulfillment in Stoffel’s bittersweet novel based on true events.
This lightly fictionalized memoir (with names and identifying details changed) begins with the author’s boyhood mission of escaping the dreariness of Reagan-era Dubuque, Iowa, and the financial strains his working-class family endured. He decides to find a way to get rich, first by trying to win million-dollar McDonald’s promotional contests—until he read the fine print and discovered the 80-million-to-one odds. As a bullied, and occasionally beaten, gay teen, he acts in high school musicals and dreams of earning millions as a Broadway star; but when he later arrives in New York with a degree in graphic design, the closest he gets to his aspirations is a backstage job with the musical Urinetown. Stoffel then bounces between New York, Paris, and Honolulu working unsatisfying day jobs—office gigs, waiting tables—while developing accomplished but not very remunerative sidelines as a painter and freelance photographer. (The author includes captivating, vibrantly colorful photos from his Asian sojourns, depicting Buddhist monks and geishas.) Stoffel finally begins earning enough money as a marketing professional involved in major advertising campaigns to make $1 million a possibility, but he’s still discontented. He thus embarks on gonzo startup schemes, including a fashion app featuring changing-room selfies of women trying on clothes, and a novelty venture called Glitter Poo Pills—capsules filled with edible glitter that, as the book’s title asserts, add sparkle to bowel movements. (Yes, they sold.) Along the way, Stoffel weathers many an entertaining—and usually humiliating—pratfall.
Stoffel’s picaresque work is a classic tale of a small-town lad with starry-eyed ambitions making it in the big city, but with a more realistic take on the circuitous path that journey takes—and a clear-eyed conclusion that the destination matters less than the adventures along the way. A pervasive theme is the nature of work and its impact on people’s lives and characters, as in a rich, physically evocative sketch of Stoffel’s father coming home from the John Deere plant: “I can vividly recall him trudging up the gravel alleyway behind our house at the end of each shift, his slim but strong frame covered in silt from the factory floor.” There are passages of bleak, plangent emotion in the book, as well, especially regarding the death of an ex-boyfriend of pneumonia: “The hospital room felt too still, the machines were quiet, and the coldness of the room pressed down on me like a suffocating blanket. He was gone.” At many points, though, this is a raucously funny book, with raffish prose full of self-deprecating humor regarding the distance between exalted pretensions and awkward reality. About pretending to meditate at a Laotian temple, for instance, Stoffel writes, “I wondered if Buddha was silently judging me from behind that peaceful smile—did he know I was thinking more about my posture and my Apple Watch than any kind of inner peace?” The result is a luminous tribute to the inestimable value of not quite getting what you want.
An exuberant life story written with humor, panache, and heart.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2025
ISBN: 9798991798723
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Cinderly Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A determined if self-regarding portrait of a candidate striving to define herself and her campaign on her own terms.
An insider’s chronicle of a pivotal presidential campaign.
Several months into the mounting political upheaval of Donald Trump’s second term and following a wave of bestselling political exposés, most notably Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s Original Sin on Joe Biden’s health and late decision to step down, former Vice President Harris offers her own account of the consequential months surrounding Biden’s withdrawal and her swift campaign for the presidency. Structured as brief chapters with countdown headers from 107 days to Election Day, the book recounts the campaign’s daily rigors: vetting a running mate, navigating back-to-back rallies, preparing for the convention and the debate with Trump, and deflecting obstacles in the form of both Trump’s camp and Biden’s faltering team. Harris aims to set the record straight on issues that have remained hotly debated. While acknowledging Biden’s advancing decline, she also highlights his foreign-policy steadiness: “His years of experience in foreign policy clearly showed….He was always focused, always commander in chief in that room.” More blame is placed on his inner circle, especially Jill Biden, whom Harris faults for pushing him beyond his limits—“the people who knew him best, should have realized that any campaign was a bridge too far.” Throughout, she highlights her own qualifications and dismisses suggestions that an open contest might have better served the party: “If they thought I was down with a mini primary or some other half-baked procedure, I was quick to disabuse them.” Facing Trump’s increasingly unhinged behavior, Harris never openly doubts her ability to confront him. Yet she doesn’t fully persuade the reader that she had the capacity to counter his dominance, suggesting instead that her defeat stemmed from a lack of time—a theme underscored by the urgency of the book’s title. If not entirely sanguine about the future, she maintains a clear-eyed view of the damage already done: “Perhaps so much damage that we will have to re-create our government…something leaner, swifter, and much more efficient.”
A determined if self-regarding portrait of a candidate striving to define herself and her campaign on her own terms.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781668211656
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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