Reasonable though lightweight advice.
A common-sense guide to managing everyday stress.
In 1998, Huljich was chairman of the board and joint CEO of a large, successful organic foods company, living in one of New Zealand’s largest homes, with all the trappings of success, including stress. And it got to him. Huljich candidly describes the dramatic, full mental breakdown that tore him away from the home and life he’d built for himself and his family. He goes on to briefly describe his personal experience as he returned to mental health, weaned himself off the psychotropic medications prescribed for him, and developed habits to maintain his overall wellness. This telling is far more self-help than autobiography. (Readers interested in a full account of his breakdown can pick up his barely fictionalized Betrayal of Love and Freedom.) While there’s nothing earthshaking in Huljich’s “nine natural steps to survive, master stress and live well,” the recipe he provides for better living is unusual because it’s so practical and seemingly easy to follow. For example, in spite of his experience with organic foods and nutrition, he doesn’t insist that wellness depends on sticking to a strict diet, just a sensible one. But smart eating habits comprise only one of the nine steps in Huljich’s recommended process for achieving better health by developing a lifestyle that acts like a stress buffer. Sound sleeping, exercising and practicing positive affirmations also make his list. Chapters devoted to each of the nine steps are chock-full of practical advice and suggestions that seem reasonably easy to incorporate into a normal (i.e., stressful) modern life. Huljich’s point—based on his experience, not medical research— is that the key to mental health is having a healthy response to stress, not necessarily avoiding it. “A dependence on avoiding stress…is a mask, not a cure,” he writes. These nine steps aren’t the be-all, end-all answer, but they’re worth following.
Reasonable though lightweight advice.Pub Date: July 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0615489209
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Mwella Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2012
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
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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