A good book to curl up with while pondering the mysteries of Morpheus.
An eyes-wide-open look at the penumbral world of sleep, where we spend so much of our time without quite knowing why.
“We inhabit a culture that keeps people on the brink of falling asleep and yet inhibits them from doing it properly,” writes McGirr (Things You Get for Free, 2012, etc.), an Australian writer and former Jesuit priest who describes instances of tipping over that brink in the classroom, congregation, and nearly every other place where beleaguered people try to grab a few winks. Blame it on Thomas Edison, who worked 18 hours per day, enjoyed no social life to speak of, and led “a gang of assassins” who “murdered sleep” with his infernal electric lightbulb. However, as the author notes, we had been trying to extract light from darkness long before. In a lively though sometimes too centrifugal cultural history, he explores key moments, venturing the wise observation that “The Odyssey is a book about getting home to bed” and working in personal aperçus redolent of Proustian sentiment: “When I was a child, I often found myself unable to sleep.” If the overarching subject of the book is sleep, its villains are the agents of sleeplessness and irregular sleep: insomnia, nightmares, narcolepsy. On all of these points, McGirr has something interesting to say, and he observes that narcolepsy, though a shadowy ailment, still affects about as many people as Parkinson’s disease and, thus, is more common than we might suspect. Being a sometime Jesuit, the author fits theology into the discussion without much fanfare: “God is a creature of the night” who was content to create darkness first and only later thought to illuminate the scene. And speaking of God, Keith Richards has some catching up to do: though well-known for his three- and four-day bouts of going without sleep, the record-holder, in 1965, went a staggering 11 days without it.
A good book to curl up with while pondering the mysteries of Morpheus.Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68177-419-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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