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
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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