Best for Coelho completists.
Meditation on a familiar Scripture passage.
Originally published in Brazil in 1991, this brief book by the author best known for The Alchemist (1988) expands on and adapts a sermon that Scottish evangelist and natural historian Henry Drummond delivered in 1884. “The Greatest Thing in the World,” as Drummond titled the sermon, takes as its subject a passage—frequently used at weddings—from First Corinthians in which Paul advises his readers that, among other things, “Love is patient and kind.” The sermon, and Coelho’s book, go on to analyze the excerpt from Paul’s letter, breaking down love into what Coelho calls “nine ingredients”: patience, kindness, generosity, humility, courtesy, unselfishness, good temper, guilelessness, and sincerity. This analysis tends to descend into greeting card sentimentality: “It’s so easy to be kind. The effect is immediate, and you will be rewarded forever,” Coelho explains, for example. While innocuous enough, platitudes like “There is no happiness in having or getting, only in giving” leave themselves open to disagreement. What is essentially a long essay is stretched into book length with the use of wide margins, plenty of blank pages or parts of pages, and fewer than a dozen sentences on most pages. The volume is padded, with a brief synopsis of Drummond’s actual sermon misleadingly labeled “The complete sermon text by Henry Drummond,” as well as “previews” of Coelho’s The Alchemist and Maktub, both already in print. But even as brief as the book is, it’s soporifically repetitive, with multiple variations on statements such as “Love above all else in life. Nothing else matters” or “The most important lesson we can learn is how to love,” and little in the way of explanations on how to put this advice into action.
Best for Coelho completists.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9780063470088
Page Count: 112
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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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