SLEEP

An introduction to the ways humans and certain other animals rest and sleep.

Readers drawn by Long’s painted view of snoozing sperm whales suspended tails-down on the cover will find a series of equally engaging scenes within, ranging from a light-skinned human baby, a pile of drowsy puppies, and somnolent sea otters holding paws (aww) to sacked-out bats, sharks, and even jellyfish. What they won’t find is consistently reliable information. Though Herkert does accurately describe REM sleep, for instance, and the diverse sleeping patterns of various wild creatures—all while noting that elephants chew food while sleeping, that orb spiders have a 17-hour internal cycle rather than the otherwise universal 24 hour one, and other fascinating tidbits—she wrongly differentiates torpor from hibernation (one is actually a type of the other) and offers contradictory data in adjacent paragraphs about how long frigate birds sleep per day. Kate Prendergast’s Sleep: How Nature Gets Its Rest (2019) will safely lull younger audiences; for slightly older ones, the hitches in Octavio Pintos’ How Does an Octopus Sleep? (2022), illustrated by Martín Iannuzzi, are at least less significant. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Curious students tempted to dive into this may want to sleep on it.