It’s not Marcus Aurelius, but there’s plenty of thoughtful, soldierly advice to chew on in McChrystal’s pages.
The former general offers nostrums for how to be a better human in a worsening world.
Character, McChrystal writes, is “the appropriate destination of our life’s journey,” something that’s learned along the way and that results from the confluence of one’s convictions and the discipline needed to live up to them. Discipline means, at one level, that you decide to undertake a challenge, you undertake it, you do it again, and pretty soon it’s ingrained. “The most effective people I know can’t help themselves—disciplined pursuit of their goals is an unshakable habit,” he writes to underscore the point. It’s altogether too easy to shirk, to pass the buck, to fail—and then to leave the field to someone else. Most of his lessons have a martial bent, and there McChrystal often draws from the same well as he has in other books. He clearly hasn’t recovered from the psychic blow of being relieved of his military command for incautious comments made around a scoop-hunting reporter, for one thing. But there’s a new, subtle critique at play here, too: One doesn’t have to read too deeply between the lines to know who he’s talking about when he writes, “When the best, most qualified people are silent, the field is left to the less principled and less qualified—often the demagogues.” Even less subtle is his passing remark on the events of Jan. 6, 2021: “Rhetoric, in person and online, trumpeted the need to stop ‘them’ from stealing an election.” Like a good soldier, McChrystal blames the foot soldiers less than “those who stayed on the sidelines.” Suffice it to say that although he doesn’t profess to be woke, he urges that the opposite of wokeness not become the norm again and that the military remain above the daily fray, since “a politicized military is a dangerous institution in any nation.”
It’s not Marcus Aurelius, but there’s plenty of thoughtful, soldierly advice to chew on in McChrystal’s pages.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780593852958
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Portfolio
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
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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IN THE NEWS
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