A thoroughly digestible guide to positive living.
Melson distills a wealth of acquired self-help knowledge into a potent formula for personal success and happiness in the capitalist world.
Got no time for ashrams and gurus but still want to understand your true purpose on this planet? Maybe you’ve already consumed enough self-help material to fill your own library and want something more portable? Melson has you covered with this cogent and concise collection of workaday wisdom that puts practicality and utility squarely at the forefront and drops it all in the palm of your hand. The author sets a galloping pace from the outset, seamlessly moving between topics impacting our daily lives including self-identity, social interaction, and money. The result is a compelling mixture of the esoteric and the utilitarian; for every foray into the philosophical and theoretical, the author includes enough hard-and-fast to-do lists, affirmations, and writing exercises to make readers feel they haven’t lost their heads in the clouds. “The best way to positively feed your subconscious mind is through emotions of gratitude,” Melson writes. “Gratitude comes into anyone’s life who speaks positive words and who gives thanks.” The author gets granular as well, suggesting that readers use audiobooks as “fuel for [their] success” and restrict their spending to “no more than seventy percent of [their] annual net income.” Melson’s discussion of what he calls the “Wheel of Values” is a highlight of the book—it serves as a nifty survival guide all on its own. Consisting of 10 sections (Family, Appearance, Friends, Attitude, Finances, Career, Fellowship, Health, Direction, and Recreations), each part of the wheel is assigned a number value ascending up from the hub. The further out from the hub one progresses, the smoother the wheel—and life—will roll. Many readers may have difficulty relating to the billionaires (Sam Walton, Warren Buffet, and the like) that Melson holds up as aspirational figures, but those who stick with his text will surely find much here to appreciate and incorporate into their own inner journeys.
A thoroughly digestible guide to positive living.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2025
ISBN: 9798317808693
Page Count: 84
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2025
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
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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