Michael McGirr

This book wasn't what I expected and I'm not quite sure what I read, but it was interesting enough for me to finish it. It is NOT a science book or a how-to book. "The Lost Art of Sleep" is a mish-mash of author anecdotes, random thoughts and bits of everything else sleep related - or rather things related to trying to get to sleep. We get to read about McGirr's personal struggles with sleep apnea, his attempts to catch some shut-eye with 3 toddlers in the house, about Shakespeare, Thomas Edison & Florence Nightingales' (amongst others) sleep habits, about the Odyssey (Odysseus attempts to get home to his bed), and a whole hodgepodge of other ruminations. Some of it was interesting, some amusing, and some thought-provoking.… (mer)

I picked up this book by doing something I don't do nearly often enough anymore: browsing through the shelves in a physical bookstore and buying books I'd never heard of just because they looked interesting. In this particular case, that may not have been the best idea, because I ended up with a completely wrong impression of what this book was about. I believe it was in the medicine or science section, and I expected it, by and large, to be an examination of what we currently know about the science of sleep.

It's not. It's really just the sleep-related -- sometimes very tangentially sleep-related -- musings of a guy who has some interest in the subject, as he was a) diagnosed with sleep apnea and b) is the father of twins, so he knows at least a little about sleep deprivation.

In many chapters, he just talks about his own life -- he used to be a Jesuit priest but left for reasons he never specifies -- and about his kids. In others, he talks briefly about literature or philosophy or history, often on the basis that Author X mentioned beds a few times in their work, or Historical Figure Y didn't sleep much.

It's mildly interesting, and the writing is pretty good, with the occasional very nice turn of phrase. But most of it feels really, really shallow, as if he's skimming over the surface of potentially interesting subjects, but never really getting very far into them before turning back to his musings on his own life again. And while there's nothing at all wrong with those musings, I just don't find them terribly compelling.

But maybe that's just me feeling disappointed because it's not the book I expected it to be, and not quite what I wanted to read just now. Possibly it's also me being a bit uncharitable because I read too much of it while sleep-deprived. As the author himself points out, "Exhaustion. . . is seldom a good listener."

Rating: Charitable or not, I'm going to call this a 3/5.… (mer)

Will definitely not put you to sleep

Who better than a sleep-starved parent of three to write a book appreciating sleep? Michael McGirr’s Snooze is a tour of cultures, of history, and of his own family and how they all relate to sleep. From the Bible and the Ancient Greeks, to modern caffeine and internet addictions, McGirr toddles in and out, always with a light, warm touch.

McGirr is a former Catholic priest. The writing was on the wall, it seems, when he gave an Easter sermon saying Christ was a hard man to nail down. And another time he actually dozed off why giving his own sermon. So he’s not some pretentious scientist, but an entertaining, engaging and inventive researcher and storyteller. And we all need a good storyteller.

The chapters are numbered as hours of the night when we should be asleep, and the chapter heading pages are all of rumpled sheets which should be put to some sort of use. Each chapter tackles a different story, era, or celebrity who had something to say about sleep

We have of course never fully appreciated sleep, and we still don’t fully understand it. So instead, we have fought it off until it came back to bite us. (Anyone who has been awake 21 hours will have the same impairment and reaction time as someone with a blood alcohol level of 0.08.) McGirr cites Balzac, who drank 60 cups of coffee a day, and died at 51. But he wrote 15 hours day. Dickens found his inspirations in the alleys of London at 3 AM.

In the Victorian era, people were famous for taking to bed and never getting out. Florence Nightingale – 60 years in bed. Didn’t stop her from writing a shelf of critically important and acclaimed works, but after the Crimean War, it was her nice comfy bed, period.

McGirr examines sleep aids, apnea (which he has in spades) and stimulants. He watches his own family, his high school students, and learns from the sages of history. There is a particularly important chapter on Z-class drugs – Zolpidem and its variants, that lays out a string of shocking stories. Sleepwalking, sleep driving, sleep cooking and sleep shopping are new diseases of better living through chemistry. It all makes for a diverting read, taking your mind off all the stuff that keeps us up all night.

David Wineberg… (mer)