{"product_id":"9781786637819","title":"Fighting Sleep : The War for the Mind and the US Military by Franny Nudelman","description":"On  April 21, 1971, hundreds of Vietnam veterans fell asleep on the National  Mall, wondering whether they would be arrested by daybreak. Veterans  had fought the courts for the right to sleep in public while  demonstrating against the war. When the Supreme Court denied their  petition, they decided to break the law and turned sleep into a form of  direct action.    During and after the Second World War, military  psychiatrists used sleep therapies to treat an epidemic of \"combat  fatigue.\" Inducing deep and twilight sleep in clinical settings, they  studied the effects of war violence on the mind and developed the  techniques of brainwashing that would weaponize both memory and sleep.  In the Vietnam War era, radical veterans reclaimed the authority to  interpret their own traumatic symptoms-nightmares, flashbacks,  insomnia-and pioneered new methods of protest.    In Fighting Sleep,  Franny Nudelman recounts the struggle over sleep in the postwar world,  revealing that sleep was instrumental to the development of military  science, professional psychiatry, and antiwar activism. Traversing the  fields of military and mainstream psychiatry, popular and institutional  film, documentary sound technology, brain warfare, and postwar social  movements, she demonstrates that sleep-far from being passive, empty, or  null-is a site of contention and a source of political agency.\u003cbr\u003eBinding: Hardback","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43205462294706,"sku":"9781786637819","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/products\/9781786637819.jpg?v=1705406993","url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/products\/9781786637819","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}