by Patricia Morrisroe ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 4, 2010
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
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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
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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SEEN & HEARD
by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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