Who knew insomnia could be so much fun?
A lifetime of sleepless nights is the surprisingly entertaining basis for this debut memoir.
Insomnia might seem like the world’s dullest topic, but Hayes dresses it up with layer after layer of humor, pathos, love, loss, and emotion. From crying babies and their frustrated, merlot-sipping caretakers to friends and loved ones suffering from AIDS, from renowned sleep researcher Nathaniel Kleitman’s sleep-deprivation studies in Mammoth Cave to Hayes’s coming-out stories and sexual experiences, sleep and sleeplessness serve as poignant touchstones to consider questions of family, friends, and life. The full range of sleep-related disorders and disturbances march through these pages, including sleepwalking, sleeptalking, jet lag, and nocturnal emissions, as well as a brief history of the bed and an excursus on caffeine—practically a food group of its own in the Hayes household, which was headed by the owner of a Coca-Cola bottling plant. Such a laundry list of sleep-related topics could have easily devolved into a frustrating crazy quilt of anecdotes and episodes, but Hayes’s steady tone—learned, friendly, and wry—creates an impressive unity throughout. He manages to treat even the complex arcana of the science world’s attempts to understand sleep and sleeplessness in refreshing, lucid prose. By encapsulating his coming-out and queer-sex stories within the overarching theme of sleeplessness, Hayes pushes the borders of gay autobiography, giving new life to a powerful genre that has lost a bit of its freshness in recent years. Hayes closes with a description of his trips to Stanford University for treatment of insomnia, but he should be careful that those treatments don't put to sleep his restless muse.
Who knew insomnia could be so much fun?Pub Date: March 13, 2001
ISBN: 0-671-02814-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Washington Square/Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
