A quick read, this hopeful book will benefit readers searching for enriched well-being.
An accessible road map to greater fulfillment, connection, and magnanimity.
During the 2020 pandemic, Brooks, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Harvard Business School, began a column in the Atlantic, “How To Build a Life,” offering practical wisdom and tools for a purpose-driven, satisfying life. A fan of Brooks’ work, Winfrey writes, “This man was singing my song.” Over the course of this collaboration, Brooks presents “clear, science-based information about how your happiness works and then instructions on how to use this information in your life.” Winfrey contributes intermittent, brief notes about experiences and opinions—e.g., “It’s about happier—a relative, contextualized, fluid condition, not some perfect fixed ideal….Happier is not a state of being, but a state of doing—not a thing you wait around and hope for, but an achievable change you actively work toward.” After defining happiness (“a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose”), the authors focus on the benefits of and skills required for emotional self-management (“metacognition, emotional substitution, and adopting an outward focus”). Winfrey suggests writing down words to that effect and taping them to your refrigerator: “Your emotions are only signals. And you get to decide how you’ll respond to them.” Brooks delineates simple, actionable steps such as keeping a journal. “Spend more time enjoying things that amaze you,” he writes, emphasizing how to consciously cultivate gratitude, humor, hope, and compassion. An example of his advice includes, “Unfollow people you don’t know…whose posts you simply look at because they have what you want.” He posits that family, friendship, work, and faith “are the pillars on which a good life is based,” and he focuses the final four chapters on each of these. Brooks is masterful at synthesizing enormous quantities of research into a simple and supportive text.
A quick read, this hopeful book will benefit readers searching for enriched well-being.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9780593545409
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Portfolio
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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
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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