A distinctive memoir for a spiritual audience.
In this spiritual memoir, Haaland recounts his emigration from Iraq to America and his discovery of “Divine Orders.”
Haaland was born in Baghdad in 1955, an ethnic Kurd in the Kingdom of Iraq. During his childhood, he was witness to the coup d’état that created the Republic of Iraq, followed by other coups that placed various parties in power, culminating in the Baathist coup of 1968. The resultant violence and militarization, as well as the worsening conditions for Kurds under Saddam Hussein, led to a growing family desire for Haaland to immigrate to the United States. His emigration featured many blockages and false starts, but in 1980, Haaland finally made it to America, where he then encountered the trials of work, family, and purposefulness. A series of car accidents led to his increased spirituality, culminating in encounters with angelic beings via human “angel communicators.” Haaland is guided by voices in all things: even as he was reviewing an early copy of this book and felt the urge to make revisions, he heard a voice say, “Don’t you dare rewrite anything. You were writing from your soul while going through those difficulties. If you rewrite anything, you will be dishonoring your soul and feelings.” He attributes this editorial advice to being that of God, the angels, and his deceased mother. The book is full of the sort of coincidences that will excite the spiritually inclined while displeasing more skeptical readers. Haaland is a proficient writer, and he’s led a life that’s been fascinating and tragic, yet the supernatural filter he places over the events is so strong that the resultant book won’t be of much use to fans of literary memoir. The first half, detailing his time in Iraq, is worthwhile as a witness account, but there is little critical dissection of emotions or events, and as a result there’s little to enlighten readers who don’t share Haaland’s belief in divine instructions from the universe.
A distinctive memoir for a spiritual audience.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-0989476508
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Northern Lights ATP
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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