First, you should know, this is not a business book. So far all of my book reviews have been in and around some sort of business, so it’s about imparting knowledge, learning information, trying to get an edge.
And this book, Greenlights, by Matthew McConaughey, my wife bought me. I let it lay around for a while before I got to reading it. And I’m so glad I did.
Greenlights gets 5 Stars
So, if the purpose of a book, like a movie, is to entertain, this gets five stars.
It’s written in a very easy to read way and it’s kind of his travels. There’s excerpts from his diary. But what I like about it is it’s brutally honest. It’s a look at his life between, since when he can remember up to the age of 50, and he opens up and talks about things with a degree of honesty I’ve never really seen in a book before.
For example, he tells the story, not once but twice, of how he had a wet dream of lying in the, swimming on his back, actually in the Amazon river with African warriors, up and down the bank. The next day he – or as soon as he could – he gets on a plane and goes to the Amazon to try and discover, to explore that dream.
You do get the feeling that he is an achiever. If you listen to how he talks and how he describes his youth, he’s always been a person that probably unknowingly was charismatic and attracted a lot of attention to himself.
It doesn’t matter who you are, everybody’s got problems with their families, and he talks about his relationship with his family, and he does a fantastic job of telling you what he found important of it.
One of the things I enjoyed as well is that he seems to be a man of integrity and somebody who’s trying to live his life morally and ethically. That comes through where he there was a point in his career where he decided “I don’t want to do any more of these romance-type movies, I want to do serious movies.”
And he refused everything that came his way. They [Studios and Producers] kept offering more and more money and he kept saying “No, no, no.”
He did this to the point the money was becoming ridiculous, and he still said, “No.” And he was saying “no” up to the point where he would have had no money left, and he still said “no.”
He eventually got what he wanted. And I think that says something about him.
If you want to explore the mind of someone else who has done some very interesting things, this is a great book, so I’m giving this Greenlights five stars.
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And the book is available at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Greenlights-Matthew-McConaughey/dp/0593139135
