"...richly detailed and thorough in its research, Becoming Insomniac will no doubt prove a piquant counterpoint and complement to works such as Anson Rabinbach''s The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue and the Origins of Modernity (1990). Certainly, Scrivner has produced a novel and engaging study. Through uniting psychological, philosophical and literary perspectives, his history occupies a singular interdisciplinary nexus, offering much to the evaluation of insomnia as it was perceived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and indeed in the Internet age." - Eleanor Dobson, Cultural History