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
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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