A heartfelt guide to personal success.
An accomplished athlete becomes a cheerleader.
In 2015, Nigerian American linebacker Acho suffered an injury that caused him to be dropped by the Philadelphia Eagles. The footballer, who had been cut five times by the age of 25 and traded after his rookie season, faced a real dilemma: the need to reinvent himself as something other than a football player. Acho draws on that experience, biblical stories (David and Goliath, Noah), and the successes of people like Steve Jobs, Oprah Winfrey, and his own immigrant father to offer upbeat encouragement to anyone mired at a crossroads in life. Now an Emmy Award–winning sports analyst for Fox Sports and host of the podcast—and author of the book—Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man, Acho urges readers to follow their dreams, take risks, and refuse to let other people tell you that what you want is not logical. “Take the chance,” he advises. “Life is short and tomorrow is not promised. Do not live a half-filled life leaving yourself to wonder, ‘What if ?’ Just go do it.” He cautions against letting other people determine your value or success and even advises against aiming toward one particular goal: “If you open up your peripheral vision to different paths your impact is so much greater than crossing one finish line.” Children, he reminds readers, “just believe, they don’t overcomplicate things” by weighing the pros and cons of whatever they want to do. “My coach always used the phrase, ‘Paralysis by analysis,’ ” Acho writes. “Don’t overthink, just believe, and thus achieve.” The author urges readers to find their natural gift—something they’re inherently good at or thoroughly enjoy—and develop it through perseverance and hard work. Never let other people’s doubt stop you, he insists: “The moment you think to yourself, ‘I might be crazy,’ is the first checkpoint on your path to accomplishing greatness.”
A heartfelt guide to personal success.Pub Date: March 22, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-83644-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: An Oprah Book/Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.
A thoughtful program for eradicating poverty from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted.
“America’s poverty is not for lack of resources,” writes Desmond. “We lack something else.” That something else is compassion, in part, but it’s also the lack of a social system that insists that everyone pull their weight—and that includes the corporations and wealthy individuals who, the IRS estimates, get away without paying upward of $1 trillion per year. Desmond, who grew up in modest circumstances and suffered poverty in young adulthood, points to the deleterious effects of being poor—among countless others, the precarity of health care and housing (with no meaningful controls on rent), lack of transportation, the constant threat of losing one’s job due to illness, and the need to care for dependent children. It does not help, Desmond adds, that so few working people are represented by unions or that Black Americans, even those who have followed the “three rules” (graduate from high school, get a full-time job, wait until marriage to have children), are far likelier to be poor than their White compatriots. Furthermore, so many full-time jobs are being recast as contracted, fire-at-will gigs, “not a break from the norm as much as an extension of it, a continuation of corporations finding new ways to limit their obligations to workers.” By Desmond’s reckoning, besides amending these conditions, it would not take a miracle to eliminate poverty: about $177 billion, which would help end hunger and homelessness and “make immense headway in driving down the many agonizing correlates of poverty, like violence, sickness, and despair.” These are matters requiring systemic reform, which will in turn require Americans to elect officials who will enact that reform. And all of us, the author urges, must become “poverty abolitionists…refusing to live as unwitting enemies of the poor.” Fortune 500 CEOs won’t like Desmond’s message for rewriting the social contract—which is precisely the point.
A clearly delineated guide to finally eradicate poverty in America.Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593239919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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