Wednesday, February 24, 2021
Review - Greenlights
AUTHOR: Matthew McConaughey
RATING: ★★★★
Summary (from Goodreads): From the Academy Award–winning actor, an unconventional memoir filled with raucous stories, outlaw wisdom, and lessons learned the hard way about living with greater satisfaction.
I’ve been in this life for fifty years, been trying to work out its riddle for forty-two, and been keeping diaries of clues to that riddle for the last thirty-five. Notes about successes and failures, joys and sorrows, things that made me marvel, and things that made me laugh out loud. How to be fair. How to have less stress. How to have fun. How to hurt people less. How to get hurt less. How to be a good man. How to have meaning in life. How to be more me.
Recently, I worked up the courage to sit down with those diaries. I found stories I experienced, lessons I learned and forgot, poems, prayers, prescriptions, beliefs about what matters, some great photographs, and a whole bunch of bumper stickers. I found a reliable theme, an approach to living that gave me more satisfaction, at the time, and still: If you know how, and when, to deal with life’s challenges - how to get relative with the inevitable - you can enjoy a state of success I call “catching greenlights.”
So I took a one-way ticket to the desert and wrote this book: an album, a record, a story of my life so far. This is fifty years of my sights and seens, felts and figured-outs, cools and shamefuls. Graces, truths, and beauties of brutality. Getting away withs, getting caughts, and getting wets while trying to dance between the raindrops.
Hopefully, it’s medicine that tastes good, a couple of aspirin instead of the infirmary, a spaceship to Mars without needing your pilot’s license, going to church without having to be born again, and laughing through the tears.
It’s a love letter. To life.
It’s also a guide to catching more greenlights - and to realizing that the yellows and reds eventually turn green too.
Good luck.
REVIEW: It’s been a long time since I read an autobiography because I normally gravitate towards fiction. I will gladly admit the handsome face on the cover is the initial reason I was so drawn to this book. Plus, Matthew McConaughey is one of my favorite actors. I knew if his talent for writing was anything like his acting talent that he would be an awesome storyteller, and I was right. Matthew is very straightforward in his autobiography, and I appreciated that. He doesn’t beat around the bush. When you read about his highs and lows, you can tell it’s genuine. I don't picture him as overly concerned about the reader being shocked or appalled at his life story, and I like that. My opinion is, if you’re going to take a leap of faith and write your autobiography then lay all the cards on the table. Don’t hold anything back, and Matthew did exactly that. I learned so many new things about him while reading this book, and his honesty and transparency was refreshing. I would recommend it.
Saturday, February 13, 2021
Review - Almost Home
AUTHOR: Valerie Fraser Luesse
RATING: ★★★★
Summary (from Goodreads): With America's entrance into the Second World War, the town of Blackberry Springs, Alabama, has exploded virtually overnight. Workers from all over are coming south for jobs in Uncle Sam's munitions plants--and they're bringing their pasts with them, right into Dolly Chandler's grand but fading family home turned boardinghouse.
An estranged young couple from the Midwest, unemployed professors from Chicago, a widower from Mississippi, a shattered young veteran struggling to heal from the war--they're all hoping Dolly's house will help them find their way back to the lives they left behind. But the house has a past of its own.
When tragedy strikes, Dolly's only hope will be the circle of friends under her roof and their ability to discover the truth about what happened to a young bride who lived there a century before.
Award-winning and bestselling author Valerie Fraser Luesse breathes life into a cast of unforgettable characters in this complex and compassionate story of hurt and healing.
REVIEW: Almost Home is a very endearing story, but I want to be completely honest right from the start and admit that I didn’t think I would enjoy it because the story kind of got off to a slow start. But when I finished reading it, I was SO thankful I didn’t give up on it. The close friendships and sweet romance are the heart and soul of this book, and there were several couples at the focal point, which I enjoyed. (It was like getting several love stories in one book.) I’m also a born and bred southern girl, so of course I loved the many references to living in the south. I would like to give a special shout-out to the author for her heartfelt depiction of a young soldier named Reed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. (It was as much inspiring as it was heartbreaking.) If you enjoy sweet, inspirational fiction, then you should definitely add this one to your TBR list. I look forward to reading more of this author’s work in the future.
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