An engaging introduction to what, Lindal says, is a world just outside our grasp.
Fictionalized account of one soul’s discovery of the spiritual self.
Challenging conventional views of both faith and psychology, Lindal, a clinical psychologist, takes readers on a journey into what he calls the Spiritual Dimension. This dimension, at once hidden and yet accessible to people, is the home of all human souls. In a bold, helpful approach, Lindal uses fiction heavily laced with autobiography to introduce his concepts. The story follows Rikki, a man born and raised in Iceland who encounters the spiritual world, in various forms, at a young age. He eventually meets Old Soul, a wise being in the Spiritual Dimension who agrees to be his “fylgja,” a guardian spirit or supernatural mentor. Through discussions with Old Soul, Rikki learns that all people are incarnations of much older souls, which reincarnate many times in order to experience emotions, especially negative ones: “Life on Earth is essentially about discovering who you are through creation, that is, the creation of experiences that bring about emotions within you.” Through these experiences, souls mature and evolve. Rikki also learns that challenges in his life, ranging from a speech impediment to his latent homosexuality, are choices he made before his incarnation for the sake of richer life experiences. Eventually, Rikki discovers that Old Soul is in fact his own “over-soul,” a term for the spiritual manifestation of a person that exists simultaneously with the physical incarnation. A major theme of the book is that each person creates his or her own reality. This is done before life begins, but it is also done as we live life, since we have free will to make our own choices. Knowledge of this reality, the author says, is helpful to people as they struggle through life’s problems and face life’s big questions. Though Lindal’s views are out of the ordinary, they are by no means unique. His choice of fiction to couch a discussion of the Spiritual Dimension works well, as it allows the book to describe the author’s ideas in a personalized manner. Though fully readable, Lindal’s subject matter and style may confuse readers looking for a conventional self-help book. The work, therefore, has more value as an entrée to his worldview rather than as a psychological aid.
An engaging introduction to what, Lindal says, is a world just outside our grasp.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-0993790447
Page Count: 338
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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