An honest, passionate and relentless quest, but at more than 500 pages, even fellow sufferers may be (perhaps happily)...
A lifelong insomniac battles the stigma attached to her disorder.
For Greene (Literature and Women’s Studies/Scripps Coll.; The Woman Who Knew Too Much: Alice Stewart and the Secrets of Radiation, 1999, etc.), the frustration of insomnia goes far beyond the endless nights waiting for sleep to come, which she describes in harrowing, redolent detail. What she finds so deplorable is the fact that insomnia is largely ignored or belittled by the general public, medical professionals and even fellow sufferers. Even though sleeplessness has proven links to heart disease, diabetes, depression, weight gain and memory and concentration loss, the medical community generally labels insomnia as a symptom or syndrome, rather than a disease. Though there is no known cause or cure for insomnia, a pathetically small amount of money is allocated to sleep research. Even more problematic is how few are willing to admit their own insomnia—perhaps because patients often assume much of the burden of blame. Greene has been advised to monitor her caffeine and meal times, to increase or decrease her exercise patterns, to meditate and to engage in countless other nonmedical remedies. She has been referred to mental-health professionals, hypnotherapists and nutritionists, and has been prescribed vitamins, sleeping pills and anti-anxiety medication. Finally, Greene decided to take matters into her own hands, seeking out countless perspectives to find out what, if anything, works. The results are mixed. The book may prove far more effective as a wake-up call to the medical profession than as a prescriptive guide for patients, though many may find her empathetic tone helpful.
An honest, passionate and relentless quest, but at more than 500 pages, even fellow sufferers may be (perhaps happily) exhausted by Greene’s overzealous tome.Pub Date: March 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-520-24630-0
Page Count: 502
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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