134 of 140 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Important Information, yet terribly written, July 7, 2002
I have to agree exactly with Leslie of Texas' review below.
The basic information and premise of the book - that staying up late decreases production of melatonin in our bodies, and messes up our hormone system's balance in other ways as well - is potentially crucial to our health. That is why I give this book 4 stars, despite the terrible writing.
The author has a writing style that I believe comes from not really understanding much of what she is writing - I was particularly struck by the sentence in the Acknowledgements thanking her daughter for spending "countless hours explaining physics, chemistry and math to her old mom". This was a surprising admission, considering that a good portion of the book attempts to lecture the reader about a variety of unrelated topics that are not really understood by the author (or any other pop science writers) - including chaos theory and many other recent areas of scientific thought, taken wildly out of context.
The important information to get out of the book, is that 10 years of research at the National Institute of Health have confirmed that modern man's tendency to go to sleep much later than sunset disrupts the body's natural cycles, and this causes a variety of health problems due to the effects on the critical hormone system of the human body. Levels of melatonin, prolaction, leptin, cortisol, insulin, dopamine and serotonin are all affected.
The essential recommendation of the book is - during fall and winter - to try and get at least 9.5 hours of sleep by going to sleep as soon as possible after sunset (ie by 9 or 10 pm), and the rest of the year to also try and get to sleep as soon as possible after sunset.
The other recommendations are the same as can be found in the books by Drs. Eades, ie follow a low-carbohydrate diet and do weight lifting exercise instead of aerobics.
I agree that it is unfortunate that this important research is presented in such a poorly written fashion, and mixed up with so much extraneous opinion.
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76 of 78 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
"Lights out" presents many interesting ideas, but...., September 28, 2000
By A Customer
As many other readers have reported, the editing in this book is just simply awful. There's the mention of an appendix that doesn't exist, the lack of footnotes, mispellings...and then there's that little side trip into paranoia and conspiracy theory in the very last chapter that had me wondering just what kind of kooks these people were! As far as the editorial errors go, well, I'll just assume that was the publisher's fault, but the rest?
But the truth is, I do believe they're onto something. I've successfully incorporated many of their suggestions into my own lifestyle after long years of low-fat, high carb eating. And although I do try, at this point in my life its VERY difficult for me to get nine hours of uninterrupted pitch-dark sleep from September to April.
I bought and read this book shortly after it came out earlier this year. I've tried a number of times to find out anything else about these authors, but have come up with almost nothing. While a fair number of people are reading the book, it appears to have gotten almost no attention past initial reviews shortly after it was published. This is frustrating since I would like nothing better than to see their ideas verified--or at least challenged. ...
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74 of 76 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Tortuous reading!, September 24, 2008
Lights Out had the potential to be a great book.
I agree with the main point of the book that it's healthier NOT to stay up late with artificial lights, TV, and the internet. I also agree that the healthiest diet is a diet low in carbohydrates (and especially low in sugar) with generous quantities of animal proteins and fats. I like the advice to go to sleep after the sun sets and to seal all light out of the bedroom. It's great that someone is exploring the topic of humans sleeping out of synch with the natural night.
BUT I have to say that T.S. Wiley is one of the worst writers I've ever read, not to mention that she's a total crackpot nut case. The writing is completely disorganized, contradictory, and sensationalist with lots of black and white thinking and lots of false information.
Why couldn't she have just stuck to the very important information about sleep, light, and carbohydrates and skipped all of her nutty, self-indulgent, provincial biases?
Her tone is often unnecessarily offensive: "Think of fat as a condom for your carbs," (page 173).
She contradicts herself constantly and gives completely false information: "The Aztecs had corn oil as a fat source, the Greeks had olives, and the Chinese had the soybean," (page 178), and then: "Think about the world we're really from. There were no machines, and therefore there was no corn oil," (page 180).
Just so no one is left confused by Wiley's misinformation, the Aztecs, who existed no later than the 16th century, did NOT eat corn oil, which was invented around the turn of the 20th century. Similarly, soybeans were NOT the source of fat for the Chinese. Soybean oil, which like corn oil is a solvent-extracted oil (thereby necessitating the invention of solvents in order to be eaten), was not produced until the 20th century.
Wiley goes off topic A LOT. At one point in chapter 9 (by the way, the subject matter is so randomly elaborated on that the chapter breaks are practically meaningless), she is in the middle of psuedo-poetic meditation on the "whirling Dervishes" of the spinning planets when she suddenly degenerates into a rant on cigars: "It's no accident that cigars have become chic again" (page 198). And this is strange because back on page 188 she lists vitamins and supplements she recommends including: "And, finally, have a drink or a cigar once in a while; and remember, unless it makes you jumpy, coffee's good for you." Why? She doesn't say, of course.
Wiley fails to sufficiently explain a lot of her advice: "Don't drink milk. You're an adult," (page 173). That's not really enough of an explanation for me. I'm still going to drink my milk.
She also fails to footnote any of her controversial statements. Says who that each human only gets one billion heartbeats, and then we die?
It would be hard to keep track of how many times Wiley tells the readers that they're about to drop dead; that the human race is about to go extinct; that once humans are past reproductive age, nature wants us dead; and that she thinks we should live no older than age 40.
And she repeats her death mantra in a moralizing tone like we deserve to die: "Harnessing the primal energy of lightening gave us the keys to the kingdom. Now we're going to pay," (page 27). "When you're not a player, nature takes you out," (page 88). "You're probably going to die . . . soon," (page 125). "Now we live too long and eat too much," (page 157).
I have three pieces of advice for Wiley for her second edition:
1) HIRE AN EDITOR!!!! (And Editor, please remove from the book all passages which are merely Wiley's opinion and Wiley's polemical, half-baked ideas.)
2) Learn how to use citations and footnotes.
3) Have real scientists who specialize in molecular biology, nutrition, and sleep research proofread your manuscript to take out all of your errors.
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