Volume 42, Number 5 · March 23, 1995
Night Thoughts
By Rosemary Dinnage
Night: Night Life, Night Language, Sleep, and Dreams
by A. Alvarez
Norton, 312 pp., $23.00
More and more books are beginning to appear on the subject of dreaming, and yet it raises so many issues—psychological, philosophical, cultural—that as yet they are only the visible part of an iceberg. Alvarez, critic and writer and New Yorker contributor, has chosen to surround the central section on dreaming in Night with bits of autobiography, bits of reportage, bits of historical generalization on night in all its aspects. The English way of leaving open the boundaries between academia and journalism is, I think, very civilized, but it does mean in this case that a great deal is spread out very thin. There is a touch of the Reader's Digest about being told that for cave dwellers fire meant light and comfort, or that research into brain physiology has not yet solved the mystery of mind.
Review, 2293 words
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