While Stone’s self-deprecating humor is occasionally endearing, the self-absorption and vapidity wear thin.
Personal essays mining the author’s struggles to improve and, ultimately, accept herself.
Stone, a freelance humor and finance writer, introduces her debut essay collection with a piece about who she was in 2004, “on the cusp of puberty, preparing to plunge into a lifetime of deep, sweaty self-hatred.” She named her prepubescent shame and anxiety Madison, described as “a phantom formed by everything I’d never be” whose message to the author was, “Everything about you is wrong and gross, and everyone can tell.” The author recounts making a list of her failings, such as “cavernous pores and…social ineptitude,” in order to work her way through them and remake herself. While this original list has since been lost, Stone’s inner critic is alive and well. “Madison’s 2004 demands were nothing compared to the round-the-clock hellscape that is the internet,” she writes. The following essay, “Nothing’s Funnier Than Naked,” begins, “I was five the first time I felt weird about my boobs.” After cataloging a series of incidents involving what she calls “body shame,” the author shares her realization that obsessing over physical imperfections comes at the cost of forging connections. In a piece that recounts the effects of religion on her lifelong perfectionism, she notes, “Childhood Evangelicalism is packed with ready-made rituals designed to annihilate the obsessive-compulsive brain.” Regarding how she eventually abandoned religion: “I ditched the church, but I kept the fear.” A self-described “insufferable goody-two-shoes” by the time she started high school, the author admits that she has “no idea exactly who or why the people-pleasing took root.” The book closes with “Madison Forever,” in which she tells us that “Madison’s still here, representing the parts of myself I’d most like to ignore.” This stands in contrast to the rest of the largely surface-level text, in which Stone maintains a hyperfocus on these parts.
While Stone’s self-deprecating humor is occasionally endearing, the self-absorption and vapidity wear thin.Pub Date: July 18, 2023
ISBN: 9780063241039
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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