A lively, if familiar, guide that urges readers to embrace their inner compasses.
An outspoken blueprint focuses on finding true passion in life.
Rooney opens her advice book with a series of basic questions that many of her readers have likely asked at some point in their personal and professional development. “Do you long for recognition and kudos because you are a rock star, but hear crickets?” she asks. “Do you crave external validation to quiet the self-doubt brewing in your brain?” Dramatized by several incidents that the author presents throughout the guide, these questions—and the unsatisfying answers people often receive from their corporate superiors—raise the subject of what Rooney calls “Heart Value” (“Your understanding—on a cellular level—of who you are and what lights you up, and how that synergistically connects with others”). She urges her readers to remember that they are the world’s leading experts on themselves and that their own instincts already know how to help them reach what the author refers to as their “True Stride” (“Your metaphor for trusting your inner compass to direct your life, set your pace, overcome resistance and honor your Heart Value with each step you take”). Rooney fills each energetic chapter with vivid anecdotal stories, inspirational quotes, and exercises she calls “checkpoints,” all designed to remind her readers that they know themselves best; their instincts are ultimately trustworthy; and their ambitions should be for others to recognize their Heart Value. Her repeated emphasis on implicitly trusting instincts will raise flags with readers who favor manuals that stress rational planning. And many of the pieces of homespun wisdom she dispenses verge on clichés (if you feel stuck, for instance, she suggests trying an introspective activity like taking a walk or running a bath). But Rooney’s legion of loyal “Striders” will love having her invigorating life plan in book form.
A lively, if familiar, guide that urges readers to embrace their inner compasses.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-73686-097-7
Page Count: 308
Publisher: True Stride
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
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
SEEN & HEARD
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