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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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