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Wild nights : how taming sleep created our restless world / Benjamin Reiss.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: New York : Basic Books, 2017Description: 305 pages ; 25 cmContent type:
  • text
Media type:
  • unmediated
Carrier type:
  • volume
ISBN:
  • 9780465061952
  • 0465061958
Other title:
  • How taming sleep created our restless world
Subject(s):
Contents:
Introduction. The gates of sleep -- Part I: The invention of normal sleep -- Before sleep was normal -- A different drummer -- Part II: Taming sleep -- Lady Macbeth's doctor, or, Sleepwalkers and lunatics -- Sleeping slaves, waking masters -- Part III: Rocking the cradle -- Wild things -- Utopian sleepers -- Part IV: Global weirding -- Beyond normal -- Epilogue. Three chairs.
Summary: "Why the modern world forgot how to sleep Why is sleep frustrating for so many people? While human history presents a vast diversity of sleeping styles, today we define a good night's sleep very narrowly: eight hours in one shot, sealed off in private bedrooms, children apart from parents. These sleeping rules have become ingrained in our culture over the past two hundred years, yet few seem able to live by them. For the world's poor, modern sleep is full of financial and physical risk, and even the well-off require drugs and gadgets to regulate waking and sleeping. Taming sleep is big business, but it has come at enormous cost to our well-being. In Wild Nights, Benjamin Reiss draws on centuries of literary, medical, and scientific writings to show how ordinary lives were upended as sleep became modern. In so doing, he offers hope to weary readers: as sleep was transformed once before, so too can it change today"-- Provided by publisher.Summary: "Humans have slept since the dawn of our species. And yet the way humans sleep across history has changed dramatically, most disastrously in our own modern era. For the last two centuries sleep, the industrialized West has reduced sleep to one narrow definition: hours of unbroken slumber, in a private chamber, alone or with at most one additional partner. And this artificial cultural definition is now spreading around the world. We've gained much from this sleeping revolution--privacy and security and independence--but along the way added a whole new host of problems: the explosion of sleep disorders, sleep anxieties, and life-style diseases connected to exhaustion and sleeplessness; the devastating rise in addiction to both sleeping pills and caffeine; the nightmarish nightly-battles faced by parents enforcing artificial 'bed times' for children. Our modern world may be founded on taming sleep; and yet our collective exhaustion reveals the extraordinary costs we've all paid"-- Provided by publisher.
Holdings
Item type Home library Collection Call number Materials specified Status Date due Barcode Item holds
Adult Book Adult Book Main Library NonFiction 616.8498 R378 Checked out 06/14/2024 33111008751063
Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Why the modern world forgot how to sleep
Why is sleep frustrating for so many people? Why do we spend so much time and money managing and medicating it, and training ourselves and our children to do it correctly? In Wild Nights , Benjamin Reiss finds answers in sleep's hidden history -- one that leads to our present, sleep-obsessed society, its tacitly accepted rules, and their troubling consequences.

Today we define a good night's sleep very narrowly: eight hours in one shot, sealed off in private bedrooms, children apart from parents. But for most of human history, practically no one slept this way. Tracing sleep's transformation since the dawn of the industrial age, Reiss weaves together insights from literature, social and medical history, and cutting-edge science to show how and why we have tried and failed to tame sleep. In lyrical prose, he leads readers from bedrooms and laboratories to factories and battlefields to Henry David Thoreau's famous cabin at Walden Pond, telling the stories of troubled sleepers, hibernating peasants, sleepwalking preachers, cave-dwelling sleep researchers, slaves who led nighttime uprisings, rebellious workers, spectacularly frazzled parents, and utopian dreamers. We are hardly the first people, Reiss makes clear, to chafe against our modern rules for sleeping.

A stirring testament to sleep's diversity, Wild Nights offers a profound reminder that in the vulnerability of slumber we can find our shared humanity. By peeling back the covers of history, Reiss recaptures sleep's mystery and grandeur and offers hope to weary readers: as sleep was transformed once before, so too can it change today.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 273-291) and index.

"Why the modern world forgot how to sleep Why is sleep frustrating for so many people? While human history presents a vast diversity of sleeping styles, today we define a good night's sleep very narrowly: eight hours in one shot, sealed off in private bedrooms, children apart from parents. These sleeping rules have become ingrained in our culture over the past two hundred years, yet few seem able to live by them. For the world's poor, modern sleep is full of financial and physical risk, and even the well-off require drugs and gadgets to regulate waking and sleeping. Taming sleep is big business, but it has come at enormous cost to our well-being. In Wild Nights, Benjamin Reiss draws on centuries of literary, medical, and scientific writings to show how ordinary lives were upended as sleep became modern. In so doing, he offers hope to weary readers: as sleep was transformed once before, so too can it change today"-- Provided by publisher.

"Humans have slept since the dawn of our species. And yet the way humans sleep across history has changed dramatically, most disastrously in our own modern era. For the last two centuries sleep, the industrialized West has reduced sleep to one narrow definition: hours of unbroken slumber, in a private chamber, alone or with at most one additional partner. And this artificial cultural definition is now spreading around the world. We've gained much from this sleeping revolution--privacy and security and independence--but along the way added a whole new host of problems: the explosion of sleep disorders, sleep anxieties, and life-style diseases connected to exhaustion and sleeplessness; the devastating rise in addiction to both sleeping pills and caffeine; the nightmarish nightly-battles faced by parents enforcing artificial 'bed times' for children. Our modern world may be founded on taming sleep; and yet our collective exhaustion reveals the extraordinary costs we've all paid"-- Provided by publisher.

Introduction. The gates of sleep -- Part I: The invention of normal sleep -- Before sleep was normal -- A different drummer -- Part II: Taming sleep -- Lady Macbeth's doctor, or, Sleepwalkers and lunatics -- Sleeping slaves, waking masters -- Part III: Rocking the cradle -- Wild things -- Utopian sleepers -- Part IV: Global weirding -- Beyond normal -- Epilogue. Three chairs.

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