The Bread of Angels

Starred review from January 11, 2010
With a family history of untimely death and madness, Saldana easily took to a career of danger journalism, reporting from risky locales. In a deliberate attempt to stop courting danger, Saldana attempted a normal life at Harvard Divinity School. When the love affair that had provided her a sense of normalcy ended, she opted to take the Fulbright scholarship she had won to study the Muslim Jesus in Damascus, arriving in Syria in 2004 amid the post-9/11 war in Iraq. The tension of American foreign policy and Saldana’s own vivid memories of death and destruction witnessed during her reporting life earlier in the Middle East haunted her, particularly when she embarked upon the Catholic rite of spiritual exercises at the Syrian desert monastery of Mar Musa. In lovely prose and with elements of foreshadowing, Saldana shares her struggles to become religious again and overcome feelings that God has abandoned her. Touches of melodrama weigh down an otherwise gorgeous and enlightening read, as Saldana’s scholarly knowledge of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism subtly infuse her story. An Eat, Pray, Love
for the intellectual set, Saldana’s beautiful memoir should not be missed.

November 15, 2009
A pious, studious Fulbright scholar's year in Syria, learning about Christianity from the Muslim point of view.

In 2004, Salda˜a arrived in Damascus, where she learned Arabic, studied the Quran, mingled with the micro-societies inhabiting the old city and frequented the Mar Musa monastery, where she rekindled her Christian faith. Raised in San Antonio, Texas, to a half-Mexican Catholic family with a history of manic depression and violence, Salda˜a fled to the Middle East after college, where she felt strangely safer. She reinvented herself as a journalist in Lebanon, before moving back stateside to attend Harvard Divinity School. The author arrived in Damascus during the second Iraq war, as U.S. bombs were dropping on Baghdad, yet she received no hostility from the denizens of the Christian quarter Bab Touma, where she found a room off Straight Street. She happily ensconced herself in this"neighborhood of exiles," full of Assyrians, Palestinians and Iraqis fleeing violence, and befriended the shopkeepers, recognizing soon that her medieval Arabic was unusable and laughable. Yet taking a practical language class at Damascus University only yielded tedious sentences full of current terminology like"guns,""bombs,""politics" and"explosion." A month's stint undergoing rigorous spiritual exercises at the Mar Musa monastery plunged her into meditation on what her calling was—to become a nun, or a writer? Ultimately, she resolved to engage in the"messiness" of life, and fell in love with a young French monk, Frdric. In the second half of her memoir, the author chronicles her apprenticeship under a famous teacher of the Quran. This"lesson in personal humility" is the most affecting part of the book, and the American author's reading of the Quran in Arabic proves gracious and moving.

A beautifully woven exploration of language and spirituality.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)