A story of sleeplessness told through lyrical bursts of prose, science, fleeting thoughts, and haphazard punctuation.
Atlanta-based novelist Butler (There Is No Year, 2011, etc.) attempts to comprehend the bewildering “aimless mental spin” resulting from a consecutive stream of restless nights. Conveyed through footnotes and streamlined paragraphs, the author recollects his troubled, paranoid childhood terrorized by Stephen King novels and sleepless nights spent “rubbing along walls” for seams in the house. When sleep came, it was accomplished by contorting himself beneath his parents’ bed and was often accompanied by night terrors, a horrific condition believed to be inherited from his mother, who documented the family in handwritten journals. He describes his present-day struggle to achieve slumber as a multitiered ritual rife with minute physical nuances each harboring the potential to allow him either a good night’s sleep or one spent writhing in frustration. Once awake, however, his “busy brain” actively nursed a buzzing Internet obsession with search engines or Facebook, “jumbling through nothing, staring at images of head after new head.” Particularly harrowing are sections detailing the author’s unimaginable near-six-day stretch without sleep and the eerie visions of an ominous male phantom lurking outside his bedroom window. Exasperatingly ineffective trials with sleeping pills, hypnosis videos and a walk-in clinic evaluation only compounded Butler’s dilemma. A slick combination of dreamscapes, stream-of-consciousness writing and referential scientific data on the compelling origins of insomnia disorders coalesce in a narrative that’s initially intimidating and demanding in its unorthodox delivery yet becomes compelling once Butler establishes a narrative cadence. A weird, waking-dream of a memoir superbly illustrating the relentless inner spin of the insomniac.
Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-199738-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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