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Cargando... Inspired Sleep: A Novelpor Robert Cohen
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Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. This intelligent novel captures early 21st century upper-middle-class dysphoria brilliantly and unsentimentally. 2001 doesn't seem long ago, but the listserv or message board transcript early in the book is a snapshot of a bygone era in online interaction. (Narrative devices like the listserv, meant to be funny I suppose, were the weakest parts of this book.)I do appreciate it when a novelist takes the trouble to write in third person these days--but the all-seeing narrator in Inspired Sleep is a little too chummy with his reader, at the expense of his characters in a few instances. Too much winking and nudging for complete suspension of disbelief. Overall, though, it's a wise and clever book with more perfect turns of phrase than I've read in a long time. He's as good as Tom Perrotta and Francine Prose, who probably don't see themselves as at all comparable to each other or to Robert Cohen. Oh, well--it's MY library and my review! I highly recommend this book, though, and hope Robert Cohen writes more novels. sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
In Inspired Sleep, Robert Cohen, author of the prizewinning novel The Here and Now, offers a brilliant and exhilarating tale of a woman looking for love -- and sleep -- in all the wrong places. Bonnie Saks of Cambridge, Massachusetts, needs help. Her unfinished dissertation is flung across her desk. Her ex-husband has decamped to South America, leaving her with their two sons. And most pressingly of all, she has a debilitating case of insomnia. So when she sees a sign that asks, ARE YOU SLEEPING TOO LITTLE?, Bonnie immediately signs up for a state-of-the-art study. Under the care of Ian Ogelvie, a hotshot researcher with visionary ideas, and with the aid of an experimental drug, she enters a vague and happy dream state that may or may not be good for her. With a keen, panoramic eye, Inspired Sleep encompasses everything from the slippery evasions of love to the intricate network of commerce that binds together Wall Street, the pharmaceutical industry, and managed care. It gives us a richly satiric and exuberant portrait of millennial America -- its believers, hustlers, prospering careerists, and shadow population of lost, sleepless souls -- dramatizing one of the most salient questions of our times: Are antidepressant drugs an escape from or a channel to our genuine selves? It is at once both profoundly illuminating and terrifically funny. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999Clasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio:
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name and sales don't rank right up there with other contemporary writers
like Michael Chabon and Tom Perrotta. In INSPIRED SLEEP, Cohen examines the
public's dependence on/love affair with prescription drugs such as
anti-depressants. Chapters rotate between the perspective of two main
characters --Bonnie Saks, a divorced mother of two, and Ian Ogelvie, a
psychiatrist/researcher on a project designed to enhance REM sleep and
thereby elevate the subject's mood. Saks is an insomniac who becomes a
subject in Ogelvie's study at "Boston General" hospital. The novel explores
a lot of big issues -- such as the way today's medical researchers are in
bed with big pharma -- and all the room for corruption/lapses of ethics that
can create. The book also looks at the potential impact of placebos,
explained in detail by Ian as expectancy theory -- the idea that merely
wanting something to come true can bring about its fruition. It's
fascinating to watch the varied perspectives -- Bonnie's a cynic, who is
depressed about her life -- and Ian is an idealist, who has complete faith
in the medical model, believing that one day medicine can find a
drug-related cure for every human ailment -- emotional and physical. As much
as this book will get you thinking, though, the greatest joy comes from the
way Cohen writes. He drafts some of the most beautiful sentences I've ever
read. If you like this one, go back and read The Here and Now and The Organ
Builder. Both are terrific reads as well. ( )