Full of unique insights and surprising facts, this book brings to the fore an entire world that exists behind closed eyes.
An investigation of the many mysteries of sleep, a subject that “opens a Pandora’s box of bigger questions of consciousness and unconsciousness, remembering and forgetting, body and soul, and reality itself.”
Though sleep has often been the subject of clinical studies and pharmaceutical research, its cultural history is rarely thoroughly explored. Mental health counselor Duff (The Alchemy of Illness, 1993) delves deep into the human experience of sleep to reach a better understanding of its causes and effects. Historically, it’s interesting to note that even basic sleep patterns have changed significantly since industrialization: Before time was managed so tightly in order to accommodate the modern workday, people slept in two chunks rather than one long sleep. As a result, more pressure is put on that overnight slumber—common wisdom today is that eight hours is the minimum required for an alert, productive morning—which, in turn, has led to widespread dependence on pharmaceutical sleep aids. The author weaves captivating anecdotes with scientific data, detailing how brain activity alters during sleep, relaxing reality-bound inhibitions and often leading to moments of great insight. Duff argues that everyone dreams, whether those experiences are remembered or not, and that these nocturnal mental adventures have a big effect on the decisions we make while awake. History is rife with narratives of breakthroughs occurring within dreams, further evidence of how profoundly sleep influences creativity. The author’s multidisciplinary approach and relatable writing is a breath of fresh air, and her enthusiasm for her subject echoes how many of us feel—we love to sleep. By understanding the mechanisms that make sleep possible, our symbiotic relationship with this nightly ritual has the potential to dramatically improve.
Full of unique insights and surprising facts, this book brings to the fore an entire world that exists behind closed eyes.Pub Date: March 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-58270-468-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Beyond Words/Atria
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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