A stimulating motivational manual, if creatively intense at times.
A guide offers creative inspiration for entrepreneurs.
In a book that is as much a memoir as an instructional manual, entrepreneur/coach deVille recounts her own personal and professional growth and development while delivering a message centered on “reclaiming and reconnecting with inspiration and your innate creativity.” Leveraging nautical imagery, deVille employs language that is often poetic, if a bit flowery: “Embrace the ebbs and flows…take the energy of the sea into your cells…transfer its power into your marrow.” Still, the evocative, stylistic passages demonstrate her unbridled passion for the subject matter. Writing from a very personal perspective, deVille reveals some of her own uncertainties and vulnerabilities throughout the account, weaving her insights and observations together with coaching counsel. Included are anecdotes about coaching clients who overcame various challenges, citations from other authorities, and salient quotations. Since her reawakening involved embracing creativity, the author stresses the importance of journaling as a means of expression. She strongly urges readers to complete the creative exercises in the book (“Commit to spending a minimum of twenty-five minutes a day, five days a week”). Busy entrepreneurs may be tempted to scoff at the inventive nature of the work involved; for example, in numerous exercises, deVille suggests reserving time to sketch, draw, and paint. In other exercises, she encourages writing poetry and journaling about challenging things, such as life’s obstacles and transformational moments. Clearly, these are not meant to be simple, quickly executed exercises—they require creative effort, deep thought, and introspection. That is the point of being “Buoyant…how we feel when we at last get to the gut of who we truly are.” Along the way, the author offers motivational coaching. She proposes “the 5 Ms,” a foundational plan for inspiration (“Meditation, Morning Pages, Movement, Moments of Inspired Learning, and Making Something”); suggests developing a personal inventory of “creativity tools”; and discusses a common weakness of overachievers (“The Tyranny of Perfectionism”). DeVille’s storytelling skill, her enthusiasm for unbridled innovation, and her fervent belief that everyone can achieve creative freedom combine to make for an engrossing self-improvement book.
A stimulating motivational manual, if creatively intense at times.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-77458-181-0
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Page Two
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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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