Five historical figures visit a comatose man and attempt to impart their path to enlightenment in a debut memoir focused on faith.
In 2003, Nafousi flew to Iraq to retrieve his teenage daughter from a suddenly war-torn country. Once there, however, he felt himself drawn to the ruins of the ancient Assyrian city of Nineveh. Nafousi says that, as he was ruminating over the current state of his country, he had to retreat to a nearby cave after American bombers began to thunder through the hills. Knocked unconscious from the air raid, he awoke to a blinding light, and soon, a group of oddly familiar figures greeted him. Five holograms in the forms of Plato, Abraham, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and Adam Smith explained that he had been selected to impart advanced knowledge to humanity due to his family’s ability to “receive Divine messages.” For seven days, Nafousi listened and debated with each hologram, learning how a higher power created the universe, down to the first “seeds” of life. The holograms stressed the importance of widespread open-mindedness working toward a “Just World Order.” A new significance behind photons, the existence of a “Divine Dimension” and a reworking of the Big Bang theory are only a few of the revelations the author says he received. The holograms alluded heavily to being aliens and said that the ultimate goal of God is to spread the seeds of humanity to other planets. The book describes the teachings of these figures in aching detail but, in most cases, with no research cited to back their claims. The writing focuses on the dialogue and rarely adds descriptions to accounts of supposedly fantastical experiences. It also relies heavily on comparing modern technology such as the Internet to evidence for the existence of God’s plan, as in a passage that suggests that “the Soul is the interaction between the atoms making our cells” and the Divine Dimension: “This is just like the combined electronic signals on a 3D TV screen forms the motion pictures.” Those interested in the intersection of science and religion may find this book intriguing but shouldn’t expect studies supporting its claims. A sprawling treatise on the existence of God backed with high morals but little factual information.
Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Jan. 30, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
A unique, incandescent memoir.
A lyrical, soul-stirring memoir about how an acclaimed Native American poet and musician came to embrace “the spirit of poetry.”
For Harjo, life did not begin at birth. She came into the world as an already-living spirit with the goal to release “the voices, songs, and stories” she carried with her from the “ancestor realm.” On Earth, she was the daughter of a half-Cherokee mother and a Creek father who made their home in Tulsa, Okla. Her father's alcoholism and volcanic temper eventually drove Harjo's mother and her children out of the family home. At first, the man who became the author’s stepfather “sang songs and smiled with his eyes,” but he soon revealed himself to be abusive and controlling. Harjo's primary way of escaping “the darkness that plagued the house and our family” was through drawing and music, two interests that allowed her to leave Oklahoma and pursue her high school education at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Interaction with her classmates enlightened her to the fact that modern Native American culture and history had been shaped by “colonization and dehumanization.” An education and raised consciousness, however, did not spare Harjo from the hardships of teen pregnancy, poverty and a failed first marriage, but hard work and luck gained her admittance to the University of New Mexico, where she met a man whose “poetry opened one of the doors in my heart that had been closed since childhood.” But his hard-drinking ways wrecked their marriage and nearly destroyed Harjo. Faced with the choice of submitting to despair or becoming “crazy brave,” she found the courage to reclaim a lost spirituality as well as the “intricate and metaphorical language of my ancestors.”
A unique, incandescent memoir.Pub Date: July 9, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-393-07346-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
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