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
Elegant essays marked by surprising shifts and unexpected connections.
Largely autobiographical meditations and wanderings through landscapes external and internal.
National Book Critics Circle Award–winner Solnit (River of Shadows: Edward Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, 2003, etc.) roams through a large territory here. The book cries out for an explanatory subtitle: “field guide” shouldn’t be taken as a literal description of these eclectic memories, keen observations and provocative musings. Four of Solnit’s essays have the same title, “The Blue of Distance,” but the first segues from the blue in Renaissance paintings to a turquoise blouse the author wore as a child, then to the blue of distance seen on a walk across the drought-shrunken Great Salt Lake. The second presents Cabeza de Vaca, a Spanish explorer who wandered for years in the Americas, and then several white children taken captive by Indians; their stories demonstrate that a person can cease to be lost not only by returning, but also by turning into someone else. The third blue essay explores the world of country and western music, full of tales of loss and longing. The fourth introduces the eccentric artist Yves Klein, who patented the formula for his special electric blue paint and claimed to be launching a new Blue Age. How does it all fit in? Don’t ask, just enjoy, for Solnit is a captivating writer. Woven in and out of these four pieces and the five others that alternate with them are Solnit’s immigrant ancestors, lost friends, former lovers, favorite old movies, her own dreams, the house she grew up in, harsh deserts, animals on the edge of extinction and abandoned buildings. All become material for the author’s explorations of loss, losing and being lost.
Elegant essays marked by surprising shifts and unexpected connections.Pub Date: July 11, 2005
ISBN: 0-670-03421-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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