A charming, compassionate guide to rethinking how one navigates and perceives the world.
Garlinger’s self-help book offers new approaches to recovering from trauma.
There are innumerable ways to experience, absorb, and retain trauma, but there are far fewer to heal from its effects. In this book, the author, a former professor and attorney-turned-spiritual healer, asserts that framing spiritual work as a journey impedes true progress—and that, in fact, people’s perception of time is severely flawed. He puts forth the notion that “you transcend your limits by accepting that you have limits. You grow by letting go of the idea that you need to grow. You arrive by letting go of the desire to arrive.” In nine chapters that broadly cover such topics as “Emotions,” “Identity,” and “Connection,” Garlinger skewers many tropes and tenets of spiritual practice and the self-help genre in general. He encourages readers to embrace and enjoy their bodies in a sexual context, noting that “spirituality and religion have a terrible track record when it comes to reproducing puritanical and misguided norms about sexuality.” He also uses analogies such as the unity of bee colonies and the unpredictability of cats to convey the value of communion and kindness. The nebulous language of enlightenment often seen in other self-help books is replaced here with ample movie and TV references (and even humor), but Garlinger’s tone is always sincere. He also hits more familiar notes in his discussions of examining and tempering the ego and rejecting the isolation of individuality. Garlinger frequently injects anecdotes from his own life as transitions from topic to topic; some don’t add much depth to his points, but others, such as an account of shopping at the Gap, effectively humanize him. The prose is crisp and sometimes disarmingly poignant; the chapters “Identity” and “Awareness” are standouts, with lines such as “Identity is simply the story that you, this divine consciousness, are writing in this very moment.…You are light taking countless forms.”
A charming, compassionate guide to rethinking how one navigates and perceives the world.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-954744-81-3
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Red Elixir
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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