Meh...really felt like this book let me down at the end. I just felt like the buildup of the story didn’t match the conclusion...as if the author seemed to be grasping for ideas to fill the pages. The writing was good, so there’s that. ( )

Alongside the 1918 flu pandemic, there was another epidemic, and epidemic of sleeping sickness. Over a period of years, it affected more than 5 million people, killing about one-third of its victims during its acute phase and leaving about one-third more to die inch by inch, minute by minute over a period of years. Since the epidemic ended in the 1930's, it has reappeared only sporadically around the world. However, we still do not know what causes the disease, nor do we know how to treat it. We also do not know whether or when it may recur in its epidemic form.

This could have been a very good and informative work on an important topic. However, it is instead disjointed and full of irrelevancies. Crosby has organized the book around "case studies" of victims of the disease (one of them being the wife of J. P. Morgan), and research and findings about the disease are presented in a haphazard manner, with earlier conclusions later being repudiated and vice versa. I ended up not being clear on where our knowledge of this disease stands today.

My main complaint about the book, though, is that it is full of entirely extraneous and irrelevant material, and becomes more of a social history than a scientific book. For example, describing one of the doctors walking through Penn Station on the way to see a patient in 1925, she goes into a description of the magazine covers on the newsstand: Ladies Home Journal--color picture of a bride and groom; Good Housekeeping--mother reading to her daughter; Field and Stream--man and woman on a picnic beside a stream; Saturday Evening Post--a Norman Rockwell drawing; she even notes a brand-new weekly--the New Yorker. A few pages later, the NYC skyline is sighted: it has "inspired many." "In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald (blah, blah, blah)""; "Ezra Pound described (blah, blah, blah)"; "Ayn Rand saw (blah, blah blah)"; "And Frank Lloyd Wright (blah, blah, blah)". I could give pages of examples like these. They really grated on me.

A couple of interesting speculations on her part jumped out at me. Woodrow Wilson in Europe shortly after the end of World War I suffered a case of flu, and apparently experienced major personality changes as well as a mental decline and physical handicaps afterwards which were kept secret from the public, which she speculates may have been the result of the sleeping sickness. (And which ultimately led to changes in the disability laws regarding the presidency.) She also speculates that some of Hitler's aberrant personality traits may have been the result of sleeping sickness, as he too suffered from a case of the flu around the time of World War I. (There are some intriguing studies mentioned regarding the connection between influenza and this form of sleeping sickness, but whether the connection is merely coincidental or meaningful is never fully clarified).

Apparently, Oliver Saks's book Awakenings covers this same topic, and in a much more cohesive way. I have placed it on my Kindle. ( )

I just finished listening to the audio version of this book and came away quite a bit more pleased with it than I was with the text version. The narrator read well, with good pacing, tone and few mispronunciations, but more than that, the lush descriptions that were a bit tedious as text came alive in the audio format. I found myself appreciating Crosby's knowledge of New York and her attention to details like what the weather was like on the dates from the case study notes.

Of course the absence of pictures in an audiobook did lead me to go online several times to try to chase down either specific or similar images to go along with Crosby's descriptions.

An interesting book, worth listening to . ( )

An interesting examination of both the time period and the disease, but it was strange reading a medical mystery where no answers were ever given and every case study ended in tragedy. I think possibly a different narrative structure might have suited this book better. ( )

Asleep
Subtitle: The Forgotten Epidemic that Remains One of Medicine’s Greatest Mysteries
Molly Caldwell Crosby
Tuesday, April 10, 2012 8:54 PM

I searched out this book as part of my recent interest in the influenza epidemic and post-encephalitic Parkinson’s disease. It was not impressive. Ms Crosby spends a great deal of prose in imaginative descriptions of New York and other settings, and does not say very much about her subject, the clinical features of the epidemic. She knows of von Enconomo, does not describe his pathological findings, and is much more interested in the development of the neurological institute in New York than in clinical case descriptions. I learned indirectly that the encephalitis often presented with long periods of sleep, and was followed by bizarre behavior (one young woman took out her own eyes), and Parkinson’s, but I was not satisfied with the depth of the book. ( )