Miller shows us how a good night’s sleep came to be recognized as critical for health and development.
An award-winning science writer takes us on a tour of the research into sleep.
Although we are asleep for about a third of our lives, for much of human history, its mysteries lay undiscovered. It was only in the 1920s that systematic studies began, and for decades, it was only a marginal field. “Just a century ago,” writes Miller, a contributing editor for Discover, “only a handful of scientists studied sleep—and not a single one did so full-time.” The author tracks the history with biographies of the key figures as they devised a series of experiments, which included two of the scientists living in a cave for a month to assess sleep patterns. Studies showed that 24 hours was the natural cycle for humans, although the rhythms of sleep and wakefulness are disrupted by work shifts and artificial lighting. The development of machines that could measure electrical activity in the brain revealed the various stages of sleep, including dream states, and helped researchers understand the connection between sleep disorders and other health problems. The Challenger space shuttle disaster in 1986, which was traced partly to sleep deprivation in two engineers, sent researchers in a different direction. Within a few years, a lack of sleep was tied to low productivity, accidents, and near misses. Further study revealed that teenagers were often sleep-deprived, a finding that led to changes in school hours. “Despite decades of studies showing that adults need seven to nine hours for optimal health, large swaths of the world’s population get less than the recommended minimum,” writes Miller. Furthermore, “our growing attachment to digital devices makes it harder to disconnect from waking consciousness, and the blue light from screens throws our circadian clocks into confusion.” Though the narrative is occasionally sluggish, the author provides an interesting examination of an issue that affects us all.
Miller shows us how a good night’s sleep came to be recognized as critical for health and development.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2023
ISBN: 9780306924958
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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