Who knew insomnia could be so much fun?
A lifetime of sleepless nights is the surprisingly entertaining basis for this debut memoir.
Insomnia might seem like the world’s dullest topic, but Hayes dresses it up with layer after layer of humor, pathos, love, loss, and emotion. From crying babies and their frustrated, merlot-sipping caretakers to friends and loved ones suffering from AIDS, from renowned sleep researcher Nathaniel Kleitman’s sleep-deprivation studies in Mammoth Cave to Hayes’s coming-out stories and sexual experiences, sleep and sleeplessness serve as poignant touchstones to consider questions of family, friends, and life. The full range of sleep-related disorders and disturbances march through these pages, including sleepwalking, sleeptalking, jet lag, and nocturnal emissions, as well as a brief history of the bed and an excursus on caffeine—practically a food group of its own in the Hayes household, which was headed by the owner of a Coca-Cola bottling plant. Such a laundry list of sleep-related topics could have easily devolved into a frustrating crazy quilt of anecdotes and episodes, but Hayes’s steady tone—learned, friendly, and wry—creates an impressive unity throughout. He manages to treat even the complex arcana of the science world’s attempts to understand sleep and sleeplessness in refreshing, lucid prose. By encapsulating his coming-out and queer-sex stories within the overarching theme of sleeplessness, Hayes pushes the borders of gay autobiography, giving new life to a powerful genre that has lost a bit of its freshness in recent years. Hayes closes with a description of his trips to Stanford University for treatment of insomnia, but he should be careful that those treatments don't put to sleep his restless muse.
Who knew insomnia could be so much fun?Pub Date: March 13, 2001
ISBN: 0-671-02814-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Washington Square/Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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