An emotionally resonant work on a powerful concept.
Hanley-Dafoe, a behavioral educator, offers an encouraging book about finding and sustaining hope.
“Hope is the crucial thread weaving through all aspects of a fulfilling life,” the author asserts in a work that aims to lift its readers’ spirits. The author views hope as a life practice—one that can increase resilience, foster optimism, and be easily accessed through such exercises as visualization. The book traces the concept of hope throughout history, from the works of ancient Greek philosophers, such as Aristotle, to American thinkers, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson. Another chapter explores the personal and societal costs of hopelessness, including the erosion of motivation, health, and connection. Using the characters Samwise and Frodo from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy as examples, Hanley-Dafoe explains how hope is often transmitted between individuals and need not originate from within oneself. The author then introduces her framework for cultivating resiliency, which rests on five pillars: belonging, perspective, acceptance, humor, and, of course, hope. She also describes how hope interacts with eight domains of wellness as part of her “stressing wisely model.” In her “hope blocks model,” readers learn to build hope by visiting safe havens and pursuing healthy habits, purposeful work, and self-awareness. Journal prompts and worksheets help readers map all these elements. The final chapters encourage readers to reach out to others and adopt the author’s “hope manifesto.” Hanley-Dafoe seamlessly combines research, positive psychology, and personal accounts to make an abstract concept feel tangible. The singular focus on hope for nearly 300 pages unavoidably results in some repetition across sections. However, the book offers a number of uncommon engagement suggestions, such as creating a personal “hope timeline” that documents hope across one’s lifespan. She also shares her own profound struggles with hopelessness, including her institutionalization as a teenager. Throughout, she emphasizes hope’s universality, noting that it “transcends time, culture, and circumstance, inviting us to envision a brighter future.” A wide variety of references, from Albert Camus to R.E.M. and Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, demonstrate her ideas.
An emotionally resonant work on a powerful concept.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2026
ISBN: 9781774586792
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Page Two
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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