THE STORIES

Harper, a retired professor of counseling at Howard University, recounts spiritual stories from his life and work, including near-death experiences.

This book is not a traditional memoir, but more of a loose set of recollections. The stories don’t focus primarily on his academic work or on his career as an author; rather, the author looks at events from his past through the lens of the supernatural. Harper clarifies the strong sense of spirituality that undergirds his experiences, centered on God, whom he calls “The Universal Spirit.” He describes encounters with a psychic in 1997 who told him to recount his remarkable story in book form; in these pages, he recalls a near-death experience in 1966—the first of two recollections in which he nearly drowned. In 1982, he writes, a man who rescued the author in one of these incidents was rescheduled at the last minute from an Air Florida flight that crashed: “Interestingly, I was en route home from work in my car on a heavily snowy day in January of 1982 when the Air Florida plane crashed just about a half mile from my location.” In another account, he writes of his first love, who died of leukemia when she was still a teenager. The author describes prophetic dreams that, he says, foretold the death of loved ones, including his mother’s demise; he also purports to have predicted the deaths of Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston, as well as the breakup of the R&B vocal group En Vogue. At its core, this set of recollections effectively preserves the author’s experiences, which will be instructive to readers with an interest in the spiritual, but it will be primarily of interest to those that know him personally. The book’s focus on premonitions and unexplained phenomena may not appeal to skeptical readers, who may wish for more concrete evidence for some its assertions than the book provides. Still, Harper excels at channeling his personal experiences into vivid narratives.

An earnest collection of personal essays that may only appeal to a limited audience.