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
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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