An engaging book that offers life tips many readers will find inspirational.
Of mice and men.
This book at first appears to be a catalog of anthropomorphisms, the assigning of human qualities to animals they don’t necessarily possess. Indeed, the author freely engages in this practice throughout. Up front, the author admits she took “liberties” with facts, “blending timelines, reimagining figures, and walking the line between fact and myth.” She says she wrote the book to focus on humans’ similarities with animals because this is rarely done. But entire fields have, for decades, focused on human similarities with other animals. (See the science of genetics, primatology, anthropology, evolutionary psychology, cognition, et al.) Even so, the book is strewn with surprisingly luminous pearls of wisdom, given that they were gleaned from a life, it transpires, filled with loss and illness. In her 20s, a death and a breakup sent her reeling. To cope, this author/artist began posting online a doodle a day. Quirky and earnest, her art and words went viral, leading to a book. In this, her latest work, the new focus on animals does become clear. When she served as a lay chaplain to the dying, it was only when she stopped trying to help them, and just sat with them, that she succeeded. “The role of the chaplain is to hold hands in the dark, not to search around for a flashlight.” She grasped viscerally, then, why the nonverbal feedback of sensitive, quietly accepting animals like horses can heal traumatized patients. She came to admire many animals—including, notably, rats. By the end, she convinces us with the power of her own story. Animals and humans share key qualities, including, despite the hardships of life, an enduring capacity to take joy in it.
An engaging book that offers life tips many readers will find inspirational.Pub Date: July 15, 2025
ISBN: 9780593831663
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Penguin Life
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
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
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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