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Wild Nights: How Taming Sleep Created Our Restless World, by Benjamin Reiss
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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.
- Sales Rank: #76483 in Books
- Brand: BASIC
- Published on: 2017-03-07
- Released on: 2017-03-07
- Original language: English
- Dimensions: 9.63" h x 1.13" w x 6.50" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 320 pages
Features
Review
"What makes Wild Nights so liberating is that it is descriptive, not prescriptive. It does not hector...It aims, rather, to describe the social history and evolving culture of sleep--through literature, through ethnographies, through old diaries and memoirs and medical texts... [Wild Nights] pops with insight."--Jennifer Senior, New York Times
"[Wild Nights] is a new cultural and anthropological examination of sleep through the ages...In excellent chapters on slavery and mental illness, he demonstrates how asylums "tamed" people's sleep by medicating and institutionalizing them, while slave owners kept slaves fatigued and thus more easily surveilled...Sleep remains a universal experience, but it's lived seven billion different ways. One finishes Wild Nights with the feeling that our modern-day anxieties about sleep are the symptom of another, more complicated disease."--Jacob Silverman, New Republic
"Sleep is a culturally fluid phenomenon, reveals Benjamin Reiss in this marvelous scientific and literary study. He deftly interweaves multiple threads, from the industrial manipulation of time to the near-hibernation of snowbound Russian peasants in 1900, Henry David Thoreau's clock-free sojourn at Walden Pond, and the 50-cup-a-day coffee habit of French novelist Honoré de Balzac. Sleep fascinates, Reiss reminds, because it is so many things: common denominator, 'hidden dimension,' field of dreams."--Nature
"Western society is obsessed with a good night's sleep. To get it, we impose strict prebed rituals and regular wake-up times on ourselves and our children, feeling anxious if we toss and turn in the night. But the idea of a perfect sleep practice is relatively new in human history, Benjamin Reiss explains in his new book Wild Nights. Until the Industrial Revolution, sleep was social, with family and even strangers sharing beds. People slept in installments throughout the day and night instead of in one straight shot, and sleep schedules varied with the seasons according to light and temperature. Parents sometimes eschewed comfortable mattresses for stiff ones, so their children would be able to adjust to sleep in new places when traveling. It was only with the rise of factory jobs that workers strictly reserved a portion of the nighttime for sleep--leading to the regimented schedule we now reserve."--Sarah Begley, TIME
"Get a solid eight hours in, no electronic screens in bed, wake up at the same time every morning, yeah, yeah. We modern fold have it all figured out, don't we? Maybe not, says Reiss, as he explores how getting a good night's sleep evolved and why it varies from one culture and era to the next."--Gemma Tarlach, Discover
"A good night's sleep, as most of us would define it, is getting seven or (preferably) eight hours of blissfully uninterrupted slumber. But this isn't always how humans have slept. Benjamin Reiss is an English professor at Emory University in Atlanta, and in his book on the mysteries of human sleep, he looks for guidance to the latest scientific studies, yes, but he also ventures beyond the realm of the scientific, including insights from history and literature."--Science of Us
"[Wild Nights is] a great, collective blend of scientific, historical, and literary works that is as well-written and enjoyable as it is provocative and informative, the central premise of this book is that we 21st century humans have inherited rules that put extreme pressure on our sleeping habits with often overlooked consequences...The readership of Sleep Health will likely find strong interest in the book's compelling content...Undoubtedly, this book is an important contribution for everyone who sleeps, scientists and other citizens alike...this is an informative read with abundant historical context that proves useful for anyone of any background. It is a tool that will, hopefully, stimulate us all to take part in the multifaceted, inclusive approaches to spark our next big sleep revolution centered around our 'common humanity' and health rather than wealth."--Sleep Health Journal
"[Wild Nights] is a captivating examination and Reiss gives readers much to ponder long into the night."--Publishers Weekly, starred review
"[Wild Nights is] a thorough probing into why sleep is such a problem for so many in contemporary society...A fresh approach to a familiar phenomenon."--Kirkus Reviews
"Reiss's interdisciplinary approach to the topic offers varied perspectives, compelling anecdotes, and a well-researched bibliography for readers interested in learning more about the global state of sleep affairs."--Library Journal
"Engaging our imagination with equal parts history, literature, science, and social criticism, Benjamin Reiss traces our past notions of sleep, from sources as diverse as Thoreau's journals, Balzac's coffee consumption, and Skinner's baby box, to illumine our present views-potentially to transform them. Just as sleep is thought by neuroscientists to 'clean' the brain's detritus of past thoughts, this book releases the too-rigid hold of past views of sleep to give us fresh reason to re-conceptualize this essential aspect of our life."--Maryanne Wolf, author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain
"Wild Nights is a literary and historical triumph, showing how sleep patterns have been deeply connected to social structures throughout human history. It is a profound and thoroughly readable book."--Carlos H. Schenck, M.D., author of Sleep: The Mysteries, The Problems, The Solutions
"With unbridled imagination, Benjamin Reiss awakens us to sleep's pervasive influence over the course of three centuries of American culture-from the utopian visions of early reformers and the chronic exhaustion of antebellum slaves to the centrality of human slumber as a literary motif. Lacking for neither flair nor wit, Reiss shows how deeply embedded sleep, in all of rich complexity, has been in the American past. Wild Nights is nothing short of a tour de force."--A. Roger Ekirch, author of At Day's Close: Night in Times Past
"A fascinating look at a phenomenon we have taken for granted. Benjamin Reiss pulls the bedcovers off of sleep, revealing a deep and significant history of Western culture and politics. It turns out that nothing escapes the tendrils of somnolence-race, gender, capitalism, technology are all culprits or agents in creating our restless nights. Written with subtlety and provocation, this is a must-read for anyone whose head ever hit a pillow."--Lennard J. Davis, author of Enabling Acts and Obsession: A History
"Through impressive research and beautiful writing, Benjamin Reiss brings readers on a scientific, literary, and historical voyage, exploring our complicated relationship with sleep in an active world."--Lauren Hale, editor-in-chief of Sleep Health
"Ranging widely across time and cultures, Wild Nights offers a rich perspective on Americans' present-day expectations about a good night's sleep. With Thoreau's Walden as his ballast, Benjamin Reiss examines the ways that religious thought, economic change, medical prescriptions, and big business have pushed sleep for those in the middle class into a single mold, while the rest of the world serves and goes without. This smart and engaging book is an ideal companion for that middle-of-the-night break, as well as for serious thought in the bright light of day."--Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, author of A Taste for Provence and Wild Unrest
"A lively, astute, wide-ranging reconnaissance of the attempted re-engineering of modern humanity's sleep habits. Benjamin Reiss pointedly and persuasively questions whether today's 'sleep science' delivers better results than what seemed second nature to our pre-industrial forebears."--Lawrence Buell, Harvard University
About the Author
Benjamin Reiss is a professor of English at Emory University. The author of The Showman and the Slave and Theaters of Madness, and the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, he lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
Most helpful customer reviews
14 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
History and literature illuminate sleep.
By A faithful Amazonian
This marvelous book weaves together social history and the adroit use of literary sources to trace the interplay of culture, social regulation and sleep. Its graphic picture of cruel sleep deprivation of enslaved people in our American south is terrifying. Its history of families' transactions around their children's sleep is provocative. Its resistance to the medicalization of sleep is nuanced and liberating. "Wild Nights" provides a rich mosaic of patterns across time, culture, families and social position of sleepers and their bedfellows. It will be an absorbing read for everyone curious about sleep and who seek options rather than prescriptions for their own calm nights.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Wild night's - sedate book
By Bob D
This book is a thorough review of the literature surrounding sleep. For those of us who or not literary students it dragged a bit in the middle, but overall gives a new way to look at how we spend 1/3 of Our Lives.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Good but a bit uneven
By SpiralPeter
I'm very glad I read this book... it helped round out my knowledge of the topic. It's a bit uneven though -- some chapters are quite a bit stronger than others. But over, it was certainly worth the money and the time.
See all 6 customer reviews...
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