Brilliantly written, supremely intelligent, and philosophically provocative.
A multiplicity of ways of looking at trees.
Moor, the author of On Trails (2016), was inspired to write this arboreal meditation after his husband, Remi, suffered a stroke. Seeing an image of neurons took the author to unexpected branches of thought about the variegated shades of meaning, concrete and metaphorical, behind the idea of a “tree.” American by birth, Moor and his husband (who returned to health), live in British Columbia, where forest fires have complicated the benign associations that Moor had of trees going back to a childhood spent climbing them and reading stories extolling their benevolence. Moor ruminates on these memories and on his prodigious reading as he travels to the Lake District in England, the redwood forests of California, the workshops of bonsai artists in Japan, the rainforests of Tanzania, and spots closer to home to explore with local experts the human (and hominid) relationships, dark and light, with these mysterious, ancient life forms. On one journey across the American South with recently discovered cousins of his family tree branching off from the probable rape of an enslaved matriarch, Moor reckons with the use of trees as the sites of thousands of lynchings during Jim Crow. In a Papuan forest, his childhood illusions about the idyllic-seeming treehouses of Korowai hunter-gatherers collide with the reality that global capitalism has turned their culture into a theme park for ecotourists. Moor writes, “there is something, which, in our tendency to focus solely on the sunny side of arborescence, we too often overlook: A tree is a way of persisting in a world of wounds....it seems incredible that trees have managed to survive at all. And yet, certain old trees have remained standing for millennia, while empires crest and crash in their shade.”
Brilliantly written, supremely intelligent, and philosophically provocative.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9781476739250
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
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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