The rare book that may help sufferers of poor sleep improve their quality of rest simply by elucidating the context of good...
A no-nonsense, science-based guide to achieving restful sleep from the doctor Ariana Huffington calls the "sleep whisperer.”
Right off the bat, Winter, a board-certified neurologist and sleep medicine specialist, dispels a powerful sleep myth: he asserts that everyone sleeps. In fact, he argues that insomnia is not an inability to sleep; instead, it reflects a person’s dissatisfaction with the quality of the sleep and, in many cases, an accompanying anxiety about a perceived lack of sleep. This reorientation of the problem casts a long shadow on the crowded market of sleep solutions, and the author cuts through the noise of pharmaceuticals and gimmicks to propose natural, implementable solutions that anyone can try at home. Throughout the book, his tone is refreshingly conversational, and while he backs up his suggestions with established research, he keeps the jargon to a minimum and focuses on clearly laying out a) the most common reasons a person’s sleep is disrupted or unsatisfactory and b) how to train the mind and body to regularly achieve restful, satisfying sleep. This is not to say that everyone can solve their sleep problems by lifestyle modifications alone; Winter examines the medical conditions, such as sleep apnea, that can result in disrupted sleep and long-term poor health. He also recommends an occasional device to help regulate sleep patterns or make bedtime more consistently enjoyable. However, the big takeaway is that sleep conditions are treatable without taking a pill and that, like so many things, a psychological adjustment may be the key to success. Many people will find this fact alone a huge relief from sleep-related stress and will be on their ways to achieving better rest.
The rare book that may help sufferers of poor sleep improve their quality of rest simply by elucidating the context of good sleep and offering the right techniques to achieve it.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-58360-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: New American Library
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
When his songstress wife Randi Tripp, the 'Bama Butterfly, runs out on him with $47,000 he's been holding for Lunch Pumphrey, sodden patriarch John X. Shade takes off with his ten-year-old daughter Etta for St. Bruno, home of his cop son Rene (Under the Bright Lights, Muscle for the Wing). If you think Rene's going to upstage the father who begot the first of his brothers when their mother Monique was 14, think again—this is John X.'s story, and Lunch's, all the way—although you could also call it a Shade family story describing how Rene, brothers Tip and Francois, and their women (Rene's wife Nicole, Tip's very pregnant sweetheart Gretel Hyslip) pass the time with the old man (``Say, ain't you fellas sons of mine?'') while they're waiting for Lunch to come for him. Along Lunch's way, there'll be a tender interlude with Rodney Chapman's wife, Dolly, and a funny/nervy post-flagrante conversation with the happy cuckold; a laid-back, menacing interlude in which Lunch, temporarily grounded by a sick car, plots to hijack John and Mary Smith (``and we ain't kiddin'!''), a pair of giggling Ioway rubes too ripe to believe; and a midnight episode with a prostitute whom Lunch pays to pretend she's his sister Rayanne reading from the Sears, Roebuck catalogue (on awakening next morning, he'll set fire to her hair). John X., not to be outdone, rekindles an old feud with Stew Lassein—over Stew's late wife, naturally—which will end abruptly when the old man responds to Stew's tormented requests for more dirty details. Characters as screwy and dangerous as any in Elmore Leonard, and a sense of pace and language that never warns you whether a scene or sentence will end in a burst of poetry or bullets.
Pub Date: April 16, 1992
ISBN: 0-8050-0927-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1992
A moving personal account of a doctor's discoveries about himself as he struggled to care for his dying AIDS patients. In 1981, when the AIDS epidemic was just beginning, Selwyn, newly graduated from Harvard Medical School, joined the Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx as an intern in family medicine, later becoming medical director of its drug-abuse treatment program. For nearly ten years, his only patients were the HIV-infected, mostly intravenous drug users and their sexual partners and children. Surrounded by dying young men, widows, and orphaned children with whom he found himself making deep connections, Selwyn began to explore his own history and eventually to come to terms with it. His father had died in a mysterious fall from a window when Selwyn was an infant, his apparent suicide a family secret. Selwyn came to see parallels between the stigma of AIDS and the stigma of suicide, between the drug addiction of his patients and his own addiction to work. The stories of five patients had special resonance for him: Nelson, with his idealized family; pregnant Milagro, bent on a path of unalterable self-destruction; Delia, whose infant child would soon be orphaned; Javon, determined to leave his son a legacy; and Betty, with her irrepressible zest for life. Selwyn is led to explore his grief and sense of loss in Kubler-Ross workshops, press his family for information about his father, recover his father's ashes, and finally to visit the site of his death. Going through fear, pain, and darkness, says Selwyn, is a prerequisite to becoming an effective caregiver, as he comes to see the physician's primary role not as an all-powerful conqueror of illness but as a companion to those going though an illness and as a witness to their suffering. Poignant revelations from the heart of a physician.
Pub Date: March 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-300-07126-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1998
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