An often thoughtful and straightforward conception of the costs and benefits of change.
Klijn presents a model for determining and achieving one’s true career aspirations in this self-help book.
The author—a professional speaker and coach, and a PhD candidate at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam—aims her book at the many people in the workforce who feel dissatisfied with their current job, either because they feel like they aren’t realizing their full potential or simply due to curiosity about other possible paths. “Considering that work constitutes a substantial part of our lives,” Klijn writes, “it’s wise to assess the type of work that resonates most with your desires.” In these pages, translated from the Dutch by the author and Molegraaf, Klijn drew on her own 17 years of experience in sales, marketing, and human resources,plus her establishment of a management training company, Klijn Creative Teaching,to create the Personal Energy at Work (or “PE@W”) model. The model encompasses physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual elements, and she examines the interplay of each using charts, graphs, and insets that relate relevant stories from her and others’ employment lives. Through the lens of PE@W, Klijn effectively examines a variety of personal factors that can generate conflict in the workplace. For instance, if someone values a sense of harmony in their life, they may seek to avoid confrontations at work; however, the author points out, it isn’t always beneficial to one’s career to avoid uncomfortable situations. While Klijn’s prose can be awkward at times (“In times of uncertainty, our decisions often gravitate towards the fear of negative outcomes”), the bulk of her thoughts on the working world are clear and thought provoking, particularly in her emphasis on the physical element of work. For instance, she points out that making decisions to ignore bodily cues, such as fatigue or stress, can have serious, wide-ranging effects. Workers contemplating something new may find much of value in these pages.
An often thoughtful and straightforward conception of the costs and benefits of change.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9789083368320
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Santasado
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2024
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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