A weird, wonderful journey in search of a good night’s sleep.
Former New York magazine contributor Morrisroe (Mapplethorpe: A Biography, 1995) considers her insidious condition.
The author is one of the millions of Americans who suffer from insomnia, but it didn’t cause her real alarm until 2006, when, “after a particularly bad night” she went in search of coffee and was almost run over by a taxi. This wakeup call, coupled with her fear of relying too heavily on sleeping pills, caused her to seek professional help. Morrisroe’s quest began with an overnight stay at a sleep laboratory, where she was hooked up to an EEG machine for diagnosis. Then she visited a sleep therapist, but the treatment plan—drugs combined with cognitive behavioral therapy—didn’t work for her. Though her hopes for an easy cure were dashed, her interest in the nature of sleep was awakened. She learns that there are “more than eighty recognized sleep disorders,” conducts research on the invention of the EEG machine, wonders how early man slept and investigates the pharmaceutical industry. The dangerous side effects of drugs and the aggressive marketing of them make the author worry that, “[j]ust as Botox moved from Hollywood to the suburban mall, people may one day tweak their brains as nonchalantly as they now freeze their foreheads.” During her journey, Morrisroe was enticed by luxury mattresses that can cost as much as $60,000 and visited “the world’s largest igloo,” at the Icehotel in arctic Sweden. On a whim she sampled a course on the practice of Qigong (a Chinese meditation/exercise system), which proved to be a life-changer. To her great surprise, through meditation she not only achieved peaceful sleep at last, but experienced a spiritual awakening.
A weird, wonderful journey in search of a good night’s sleep.Pub Date: May 4, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-385-52224-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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