A forceful and wide-ranging advice book for readers raising young women.
A parenting guide that aims to help mothers support their daughters.
At the start of this book, therapist and coach O’Grady, author of Dial Down the Drama (2015), advises readers to create a “Powerful Parenting Message,” offering an example: “I trust my daughter and support her in her best next step. I choose to listen to, enjoy, and stay connected with my daughter.” The support may take many forms, she points out, and the “next step” may be hard to predict, but the book emphasizes the crucial role of listening throughout. Drawing on her own experiences as a mother and nearly 30years of counseling parents as a marriage and family therapist, O’Grady presents her readers with straightforward discussions of a wide array of subjects, from learning how to let go when daughters leave home for school—including how to retire the “monitoring” part of parenting, which she notes can stick around in unhealthy forms—to setting common-sense boundaries. Each chapter ends with an exercise to help mothers act on what they’re reading, such as journaling about a daughter’s positive traits: “One thing you are grateful for in your daughter,” “One thing you delight in about your daughter,” and so on. Over the course of this parenting manual, readers will find that O’Grady’s advice is uniformly sound and empathetic; one will immediately feel as if one is in caring hands, but there’s a toughness here, as well. Her willingness to tackle darker subjects, including what to do if one’s daughter is sexually assaulted, only makes its unaffected directness more valuable. The prose is appealingly direct throughout: “Are you an adult just because you turn eighteen? Neuroscience doesn’t think so.” The book’s many anecdotes about mothering struggles are instructive, but O’Grady’s own strong, patient advice is its highlight.
A forceful and wide-ranging advice book for readers raising young women.Pub Date: May 3, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-77458-145-2
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Page Two
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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