Sometimes bromidic but mostly thoughtful and inspirational.
A call to everyday heroism.
A retired four-star admiral, former chancellor of the University of Texas System, and bestselling author, McRaven puts forth a 10-point credo called “The Hero Code,” building on many of the familiar ideas he discussed in his 2017 megahit, Make Your Bed. The author examines such virtues as courage, sacrifice, duty, and forgiveness, presenting each concept within a short personal promise—e.g., “I will be kind and compassionate to at least one person every single day and expect nothing in return.” For the author, this code is “an internal code of conduct that drives the human race to explore, to nurture, to comfort, to inspire, and to laugh so that societies can flourish.” As such, he writes, “There is a hero in all of us,” a fairly banal theme that echoes throughout the book. McRaven offers a brief chapter on each of the virtues of heroism, using military examples from both history and his personal experiences as a NAVY Seal and beyond. He often pairs the extraordinary with the mundane. For example, in the chapter on duty, the author begins with the well-documented story of John McCain’s horrific captivity in Vietnam. Then he relates the more prosaic—yet compelling—anecdote about a soldier in Afghanistan whose refusal to let anyone through her gate without authorization from her sergeant caused McRaven to be late to a meeting with President Barack Obama. Throughout, the author repeatedly shows how a person need not be placed in an exceptional moment to act exceptionally. After describing the courageous actions of Medal of Honor recipient Ralph Johnson, who saved others by falling on a grenade during the Vietnam War, McRaven notes, “for most of us…our sacrifices do not come in one shining moment of extraordinary valor.” Instead, those sacrifices come from living by a moral code every day.
Sometimes bromidic but mostly thoughtful and inspirational.Pub Date: April 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5387-1996-1
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
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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