The Family That Couldn't Sleep: A Medical Mystery » (Reprint)

Grover Gardner has recorded over 450 audiobooks and was named one of Audiofile Magazine's Golden Voices of 1999. He is a member of the Woolly Mammoth Theater Company, Resident Director at Everyman Theater in Baltimore and has received 5 Helen Hayes Award nominations of his work.

In The Family That Couldn't Sleep, essayist and journalist D. T. Max tells the spellbinding story of the prion's hidden past and deadly future. Through exclusive interviews and original archival research, Max explains this story's connection to human greed and ambition-from the Prussian chemist Justus von Liebig, who made cattle meatier by feeding them the flesh of other cows, to New Guinean natives whose custom of eating the brains of the dead nearly wiped them out. The biologists who have investigated these afflictions are just as extraordinary-for example, Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, a self-described "pedagogic pedophiliac pediatrician" who cracked kuru and won the Nobel Prize, and another Nobel winner, Stanley Prusiner, a driven, feared self-promoter who identified the key protein that revolutionized prion study.With remarkable precision, grace, and sympathy, Max-who himself suffers from an inherited neurological illness-explores maladies that have tormented humanity for centuries a

The New York Times - Natalie Angier

In this gripping, cleanly written, cannily plotted and elegantly educational book, D. T. Max shows us what happens when the insomnia isn't ordinary and doesn't end, no matter how aggressive the medical intervention or generous the sedative prescription…the book brims with great tales, some tragic, others cautionary.