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Recent Reviews
Kenneth Miller
Rave The New York Times Book Review A propulsive, utterly engrossing history of the subject, seen through the prism of four of its prominent contributors ... Miller’s narration of the subject is commanding, bright and deft. His prose cuts and flows through the last century of impossibly complex stop-start progress in the measuring and quantifying of sleep — why we do it, and how. None of it is simple and all of it is captivating ... Miller is superb at identifying and then interweaving the multiple confluences of this sprawling subject. There are interesting discussions of sleep disorders and of the impact of impaired sleep on society. But the most fascinating of the book’s threads is that of REM sleep ... I found myself studding the margins with exclamation marks.
Tarashea Nesbit
Positive The New York Times Book Review Perhaps my being English distorts my reading here, but I see something else at the novel’s core, a critique of Englishness itself. There is a contradiction underpinning the whole project of English imperialism, and Nesbit flags it perfectly ... For all the novel’s quietness of telling, its currency is the human capacity for cruelty and subjugation, of pretty much everyone by pretty much everyone ... The depiction of cruelty is all the more nuanced for being told through the prism of the female characters. They are not weak, but they are powerless, ruled by men and God ... It’s here, in the narration, that the novel finds itself — in the equable plainness of its language, a plainness that is nevertheless impressionistic and light-filled. There are some bright, startled moments in which Nesbit makes something utterly recognizable and mundane, yet also utterly other ... The novel is most successful where it allows itself to stray from historical fact and plot — to invent and to play with language, to give itself imaginative time and space. Nesbit is brilliant in those moments, and captures a paradox of historical writing — that it’s in the invention and improvisation that the past feels most pressing and most real.