Stressed-out readers looking to make changes in their lives will want to pick up a copy of this book.
Houser discusses burnout and offers remedies for the critically overburdened in this motivational primer.
In this self-help guide, the author, a career strategist and empowerment coach, speaks about her own experience with burnout and details how she found her way to becoming “lit up” instead (“Like many women, especially full-time working parents and care‐givers, I slid down the long slippery slope of being everything to everyone—except myself”). The book is chock-full of helpful, battle-tested advice designed to lift readers from the despair of feeling pushed past their limits. The format of the guide echoes its function: The book’s nine chapters are concise and manageable, and not at all overwhelming (Houser recommends reading one chapter a week). The topics range from the impact of technology on our lives to the effect a physical space has on people’s moods. Each chapter contains “questions, ideas or activities” to help “create a multidimensional, badass life that you don’t need to escape from.” The activities, which allow readers to implement the ideas that Houser introduces in their own lives, include reading poems, reflecting on what burnout looks like to them, and tidying a small section of a room. The author’s writing style also contributes to the guide’s effectiveness—instead of brimming with long, winding, and dry stretches of text, Houser’s book features succinct paragraphs that don’t allow their brevity to curtail her message. Despite the book’s concision, Houser includes a wide range of scientific information gleaned from various studies to support and contextualize her anecdotes and justify her post-chapter activity recommendations. The author’s vulnerability in sharing her own story (“Even looking for the resources to help myself out of this hole seemed impossible. I ended up in such a bad place that I needed to take a leave from work for the sake of my physical and mental health”) adds an additional layer of credibility to her advice.
Stressed-out readers looking to make changes in their lives will want to pick up a copy of this book.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2023
ISBN: 9798988925200
Page Count: 176
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 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
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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