Questões de Inglês - Reading/Writing

Men Adrift
Cynthia Fuchs Epstein
The Betrayal of the American Man by Susan Faludi, William Morrow & Co., 1999 662 pp. $27.50

    Scores of men, their wives and partners, friends and kin, and the sharks that have exploited them come alive through Faludi’s keen reporting. The men she writes about are presented as prototypes of the generation of baby-boomer men who have experienced layoffs, broken promises of upard mobility, the Vietnam War, meaningless work, and new definitions of “what it means to be a man” in contemporary America. A further “cause” of their plight, she writes, is the emphasis on celebrity in American culture. The narratives in Faludi’s book are woven through with themes of loss and the substitution of superficial values for the “real” values of meaningful work.

     Faludi asserts that many men today feel “shipwrecked” in a service economy, but that this is only the start of their troubles. Victims of downsizing and de-skilling, they no longer play breadwinner roles in their families and develop difficulties in their marriages. In some cases, wives they once supported now support them.

     Through this book she hopes to make men conscious of their condition and to encourage them to mobilize in ways approximating the women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s. This is a commendable task, but it is doubtful whether men will either accept its premises or identify with the individuals Faludi refers to in making her case.

(Adapted from https://www.dissentmagazine.org)

TEXTO:

    Bizarre tales of people cooking, wandering
outdoors, and even driving around while fast asleep
are part of a phenomenon known as somnambulism,
or sleepwalking. While your natural inclination might
[5] be to wake up someone who is fumbling around in a
daze, it’s commonly thought that this could be
dangerous.
    Dr. Mark Mahowald, a sleep specialist at Stanford
University, says that, while it wouldn’t necessarily hurt
[10] to try to wake a sleepwalker, it’s notoriously difficult to
rouse them in this state. Rousing a sleepwalking person,
especially vigorously, might confuse or distress them
temporarily. Disoriented, they may strike out at anyone
close. “Best thing you can do is turn them around and
[15] send them back to bed. It is not likely that a sleepwalker
when woken up suddenly will have a cardiac event. It
is no different from when a person sleeping normally is
suddenly awakened by, say, a loud noise. The important
thing is to protect a sleepwalker from themselves.
[20]    While still somewhat stigmatized, sleepwalking
is incredibly common. Actually, between 1 percent
and 15 percent of the United States population
sleepwalks, and almost all children have had
sleepwalking episodes, according to The National Sleep
[25] Foundation.”Sleepwalking is part of the human
condition,” Mahowald said. “It is absolutely not
associated with psychiatric disorders.”
    People who sleepwalk tend to have no memory
of the episode, Mahowald explained. This is
[30] because the behaviors take place without conscious
awareness — they originate from the brain’s central
pattern generator, where the neural pathways for
learned and heavily practiced movements are stored.
For this reason, you won’t find a sleepwalker playing
[35] the piano if that person has no prior musical training or
speaking a language they don’t already know, he said.

GOLDBAUM, Kate. Disponível em: https://www.livescience.com/ 55332-should-you-wake-a-sleepwalker.html.Acesso em: 1 nov. 2018. Adaptado.