A call to true patriotism, perfectly timed for the nation’s 250th birthday.
A collection of speeches and poems by the noted Navy SEAL, retired four-star admiral, and author of Make Your Bed (2017).
First, the poems: With stanzas like “I hope those we saved will remember us, / and the innocents we harmed will forgive. / But to those who bore arms against us, / may you regret each day that you live,” Wilfred Owen and Randall Jarrell have nothing to worry about. The speeches are another matter. A fluent, inspiring speaker, McRaven revisits themes that both evoke the military academy motto of his title and insist on the need to more than rise to each occasion, as he exhorts the MIT graduating class of 2020, “Go forth and be the heroes we need you to be.” Perhaps the best-known of the speeches gathered here is from another graduation, this one at the University of Texas in 2014, in which he urges his audience to make their beds first thing in the morning, so they’ll “start each day with a task completed.” (besides, he notes, doing so “will also reinforce the fact that little things in life matter.”) A constant critic of President Trump (though he doesn’t mention the name anywhere here), McRaven speaks at several points to the nation’s best ideals: “We must ensure that we open our doors to those yearning to breathe free”; “We need to have men and women who uphold the standards of everything we hold dear”; “If we want American democracy, not Chinese communism or Russian authoritarianism, to lead the change, then we must arm ourselves with the smartest citizens our society can produce.” Points taken. And McRaven does a nice bit of double duty by twitting the sitting president and his ilk and praising his own ancestry at once: “Behind every attempt to overthrow the tyrants who hold on to power unearned—there is an Irishman.”
A call to true patriotism, perfectly timed for the nation’s 250th birthday.Pub Date: April 21, 2026
ISBN: 9781538780947
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
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