Book Reviews

Falling into Freedom Reviews:

National Association of Book Entrepreneurs Pinnacle Award

for 2019

Best Book in Personal Growth Category.

Site link: Award

Larry McDermott - Email

Owner – Petaluma Home Repair

Thank you for creating a book that I really enjoyed and will share with others. Michael you have done a really outstanding job in self-reflection at a very high level. The picture on the cover speaks for itself, what you wrote inside answered what I always wanted to know. What would that person’s life been like if they had just gotten over that tough spot?

You were brave enough to face your fears, share them with us and so much more. Well done from start to finish.

Sharing is so healthy, and you have done a lot of that. Thank you, Michael.

Larry McDermott on Amazon

Posted 4-Star Amazon Review

Life’s about positive choices

The picture on the cover of Falling into Freedom tells a story of it own. Within the cover a separate story of taking a positive path. Michael Doud the author and pictured on the cover steps back that day on the cliff and decides bravely faces his troubles. He shares those troubles and how he resolves them. A interesting journey in his persistent pursuit of life and happiness.

Burr Leonard – Creator and Founder of The Bar Method

Posted 5-Star Amazon Review

An engrossing story about a former soldier's search for enlightenment

I loved this book. It contains one of the most beautiful descriptions I’ve ever read of the experience of enlightenment. Michael starts his story standing on a cliff about to jump to his death. We learn that his depression was brought on, in part by his rigid upbringing and in part by the lingering trauma of killing and drug abuse during his tour in Vietnam. Instead of ending his life, Michael decides to search for some kind of inner peace. His sometimes crazy, sometimes, funny journey through New Age experimentation and ultimately to meditation leads him to the answers he was seeking, which he condenses for us into “Five Principles of Freedom.” My favorite passage in the book when Michael is wandering in a British pasture and suddenly enters awareness. He paints the experience as almost psychedelic, a journey beyond time to total, selfless acceptance.

Rich Villazon — Evolution Coach – www.richvillazon.com

Posted 5-Star Amazon Review

A book about courage, vulnerability, and compassion. 

Powerful spiritual book on vulnerability and transcending one’s past. Really appreciate his own personal story how he transcended his suffering, and how he used every moment or hardship in his own life as an opportunity to grow and expand. Also, love the framework he gives on his 5 principles of Freedom, if you work on just these principles alone it’ll change your life.

Cynthia Rogers – MFT 

Posted 5-Star Amazon Review

An inspiring memoir and spiritual guide.

I was deeply moved by the personal stories and the "Principles of Freedom" he shares in this book. There were many stories of vulnerability, grace, and courage which I had never heard him speak of before. I found the memories and insights incredibly moving - especially his openness regarding his time serving in Vietnam. In terms of his acts of generosity - some of these I have experienced firsthand and will always be grateful. Thank you, Michael, for committing your experiences to the written page. For those of you desiring inspiration as you continue to work towards "falling into" yourself and the freedom which resides there - enjoy this book!

Daniel Casey of Misanthropester.com

Site Review here

Posted 4-Star Amazon Review

Touching and Challenging.

In 1989, Michael Doud realized he had been depressed for nearly 40 years and wanted to break free of it, “I’ve done this before. I’m doing it again, making yet another attempt to escape my unsatisfactory life and probably botching it one more time.” What we read in his memoir of sorts, Falling into Freedom, is a personal history, an inventory of all the successes and challenges that built up to that moment in the winter of 1989 where Doud decided he’s have enough.

In the narrative mix, Doud isolates the causes of anger and frustration, those roots of his battle with depression, as well as the effects of poor decisions. Readers will find the book raw and open, a trait common in many memoirs, but Doud is able to present us with something more than just a personal narrative writ large. He is able to craft a work of nonfiction where he is actively striving to articulate and act on beliefs, concepts, and hopes to not merely ‘right’ his path but to allow him to live a life of meaning. Thus, we are presented with a sort of coming of age story regarding personal philosophy and one meant to be not just an inspiration to others but offer practical advice.

Nearly everyone who sits down to write about their life is insistent they’ve lived through something meaningful not just for themselves but for others. This imperative to tell, to share with others is a noble instinct yet as we all know, often times ‘crazy adventures’ are really just bland, self-absorb tales. Fortunately, Doud’s vignettes avoid such tiresomeness by focusing on consequences rather than on the mere acts themselves, a simple distinction but one often lacking in works of the genre.

Recounting his fears and anxieties, Doud brings readers back again and again to his generation’s greatest successes and failures as he stands a mirror for many Boomers to see themselves reflected. Discovering and embracing meditation but finding it elusive to truly capture due to seemingly ever-present desires, Doud as a young man seems to drift. The trauma of Vietnam sends him down a dark path but yet even in that dimness there is a flicker of that sense of ease and calm he first experienced in mediation.

Thus, when he and by proxy readers discover that this has been the goal all along, we can see a true change in how one relates to the world around oneself. Doud is his own test subject taking readers across the world in search of actualization. There is certainly success here. His method for self-examination is unpretentious with its great strength being it can only give out to practitioners what they are willing to put in. It may not sound like much, but this trait alone will often delineate authentic practices for self-improvement from those ‘quick fixes’ pedaled by many a guru. Many readers of the spiritual and self-help genre will find Falling Into Freedom at once touching and challenging as it is designed not just to inspire but to provoke action. As such, it is one of more superior works of personal growth and transformation one could find.

Gordon Radley - Former President of Lucasfilm Ltd.

Letter Review of Falling into Freedom

Michael,

I am sitting in Jerusalem and just finished reading your book.

I am so impressed with what you took on and accomplished in the breadth and depth of your message and the challenges expressing such abstract and highly idealized concepts. I am also so impressed with your personal journey and all of the places, internally and externally, it took (and takes) you. As I would read a particular date in your journey, I would think of where I was at the same moment, and it made me feel that my journey has been so relatively "smooth" (although I wouldn't have thought so at the time). We all are on unique journeys, but yours has been filled with all the clichés of "ups and downs" that seem to require so much more. Your written journey appears to end in 1998 as you head out on a world tour which left me wondering what happened next...perhaps that is for a later conversation...

Your vignette of your father's death literally moved me to tears, both for you and I guess for me. For me, this is "the moment" in your book, and those couple pages summed up all the learnings from your meditations, seminars, readings, life experiences. It had such power of clarity for the reader to "get" what you worked so hard (for a good reason) to express.  Your simple, elegant presentation of this moment in your life gave an existential example and summed up all the teachings you want/hope the reader will understand. There is no need to summarize how it is the exemplar of how one can hopefully be in this life. It was and is the "truth" of human existence, and I will carry that moment with me for the rest of my life.