A pat motivational book with a slick gloss.
Qandeel applies street knowledge to business and dating in this debut self-help guide.
To be street smart means to possess a certain blend of worldliness, common sense, and people skills, but the author argues that there’s more to it than that: “It is about being always ready to learn new skills and ideas in order to be the winner rather than accepting defeat,” writes Qandeel in his introduction. “It is also about not taking no for an answer and using your problem-solving skills to make things work.” With this book, Qandeel helps the reader adopt the “street smart mindset” in order to better succeed in business, investing, romance, and more. He breaks down the necessary components to reshape one’s mindset, from finding the proper motivation and expanding one’s tool kit to abandoning the security of a 9-to-5 job, launching side hustles, and navigating interpersonal relationships. The author distinguishes being “book smart” from being street smart, claiming that street smart people are better equipped to take advantage of book smart people. (Nikola Tesla? Book smart. Thomas Edison? Street smart.) In addition to business, Qandeel advises the reader on dating and romance, detailing seven types of men and women and the issues that can doom a relationship. In keeping with his street-smart persona, the author dispenses some cynical advice—he discourages men from being “nice guys,” favors prenups, and encourages readers to embrace manipulation. “Some people want to act morally superior and refuse to admit to using manipulation at any point in their lives,” he writes. “Well, let me tell you that if you ever tried to get a job, you most likely used manipulation.” Qandeel does not offer much evidence of his expertise besides mentioning a few of his business ventures (snow removal, a collision center), and much of his advice is fairly rote. Even so, his direct manner will no doubt appeal to some readers.
A pat motivational book with a slick gloss.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781038324276
Page Count: 126
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2025
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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