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
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
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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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