Customer Reviews

Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream: A Day in the Life of Your Body

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I suspect that most of us assemble an ad hoc model of how bodies work when we are children, and then forget about the subject until things go wrong or major stories hit the news. Recent advances in genetics, endocrine analysis, imaging, and so forth mean that much of what we learned is probably wrong, or at least woefully inadequate. Ackerman's book provides a nice survey of the state of the art, mixing the simply fascinating (e.g. the way temperature affects our tastebuds) with the extremely practical (many medical tests, including simple observations like temperature, vary so much over the day that it makes sense to timestamp them). One of my favourites: why do sick people always seem impatient with their caregivers? It turns out that if you have a fever, your sense of the passage of time is substantially compressed.

One reviewer was ticked off by the first person style, which I found weird: should Ackerman have concocted an artificially neutral, PC persona? I don't think so. She quotes Thoreau: "I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well", and the book is better for it.

I do, however, wish that in the Acknowledgments she had credited the title of the book to King Crimson: [...] . Also, it would be nice if she or her publisher had put up a website with links to the various research papers and authors that she cites. Paper end-notes don't really cut it any more.

As a psychiatrist with a special interest in sleep and wake disorders, I thought I wouldn't learn anything new in "Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream". Was I wrong?

Absolutely, this is a book that we all should read. Ms Ackerman talks about bodily functions that we never think about - with elegance and wit. Her literature citations are up-to-date and relevant. Even those with a Y chromosome will appreciate the beauty in her prose (except Mr. Reid).

I strongly recommend this book to the lay public and health professionals alike.
LPL

All I did was read the prologue of this book and I was hooked. I decided to take a "sick day" so I could read it without interruption. It is written with great wit, style, and is a veritable page-turner. I work in Health Services and I am going to highly recommend this book to all my clients. It is informative, fascinating and fun. I am going to give it to everyone on my list for Christmas!

I've been reading Jennifer Ackerman's work for more than a decade, since I ran across her insightful and beautifully written first book, NOTES FROM THE SHORE. I keep it on my shelf that holds Annie Dillard's PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK and Thoreau's WALDEN and Henry Beston's THE OUTERMOST HOUSE. Her freshman access to my club of household gods meant that from the first I thought that Ackerman had style and a voice and staying power. Immediately I knew that I would have to watch the rest of her work evolving over the years.

Her natural history of heredity, CHANCE IN THE HOUSE OF FATE, proved that she could handle larger thematic approaches as beautifully as she wrote first-person anecdotal natural history.

In her latest book, she merges the two, creating a larger thematic overview of a day on earth in personal, up-close terms that make all the science relevant to everyday life. In SEX SLEEP EAT DRINK DREAM, Ackerman marshals an impressive amount of research, keeps it relevant and part of the narrative that we relive every day, and does all this work for us in an elegant, lucid voice. As someone who loves good writing about nature and science, but who picks up and puts down a lot of science books, I have to ask, "What more do you want from a writer?"

To respond to the cosmos with a sense of its mystery, to use the tools and discoveries of science to launch a meditation on meaning and significance, is to rise above ordinary science writing and create literature. That some science nerds will complain about the art may itself be a testament to the art.

This book is the first I have read that really gave me insight into the basic things that govern our waking (and unconscious) lives. I could easily see myself and others when the author outlined in detail what is happening in our bodies at any given time during the day and night and how we (differentially) respond. No other book I have read ever laid it out like this, hour for hour. Does that make getting up in the morning in the winter any easier for me? No! But at least now I have the ammunition I need when others, i.e. those chipper morning types who try to make me feel guilty about my morning moping, make me feel inadequate. The author depicts things in a wonderfully direct and often personal manner that really makes it easy for the reader to relate. I found this an enjoyable and fun read, even if unsettling at times. We don't want to think that we are slaves to our hormones or circadian rhythms, and yet this book teaches us that we ignore these fundamental aspects of our nature at our peril. A wonderfully informative and insightful read. This is an author who really speaks to me; I am eager to read her other books and articles.

This is one many great recent 200 page or so science books which are helpful at introducing the subjects they discuss.

In this case, the subjects treated are sex, food consumption, and sleep and dreams.

With reference to the sexual issues, those who find their curiosity peaked by the issues in this book would be well advised to do follow up reading with such books as Dr. Helen Fisher's Why We Love as well as Matt Ridley's The Red Queen and Jared Diamond's Why is Sex Fun?

As it relates to the sleep research could follow this book up with Andrea Rock's very excellent Mind At Night which follows up some of the points made in this book concerning the essential nature of sleep.

As it relates to food consumption this book was a great primer and for me opened up new vistas of thought about what I had previously thought was just a mundane issue...eating and drinking.

But in the end I guess that's the function of great science writing to make us see the wonder in even supposedly ordinary things.

Or as Confucious once said: "Ordinary thinkers only see the wonder in great things but great thinkers see the wonder in even the ordinary."

I was totally amazed to read the up-to-date information included in Ackerman's book! She clever recounts a day in the life of the human body, smoothly blending one topic into the next with interesting anecdotes coupled with scientific data to explain complex body systems making their relationships to each other easily understood. Imagine my surprise to find one eloquent paragraph explaining the harmfulness of chronic daily stress and the damage it causes (the fraying of telemears)to the reproduction of needed cells! A pleasure to read. It's not a self-help book. Ackerman just lays out the scenarios for you.
Excellent! Anyone interested in their health should read it!

Science writer Ackerman makes a good case for minding your inner circadian clock in this lively, seamlessly organized survey of what goes on in your body over a 24-hour period.

Ackerman ("Notes from the Shore," "Chance in the House of Fate") has a conversational, personal style that lends itself well to this intimately human material - and also makes her biases clear. She's a lark for one thing - early to bed, early to rise - rather than a night owl, and finds much support for this inclination in the latest biological research.

Night shift workers, for instance, have higher rates of cancer (possibly from their repressed melatonin rates), and most human-caused disasters have occurred in the wee hours of the morning.

Ackerman covers a lot of material in this 200-page (plus notes and index) book, but it never feels rushed or overly superficial. She tells us what's going in within at various times, reviews the latest studies, large and small, and interviews some of the researchers for a bigger picture. For those interested in delving deeper, copious notes provide sources.

She begins with a 5:30 am wakeup and a discussion of the circadian rhythms of all creatures, the phenomenon of morning stupor and the miraculous effects of caffeine. Morning brings a discussion of the senses: the subtlety of smell, the effects of body temperature on time perception, our fine-tuned hearing.

Noon calls for a detailed examination of the mechanisms of taste and the digestive system, individual differences in metabolism and the effect of some of our billions of microbes on fat processing. Some people really do get fatter than others on the same donut - and they can thank their gut microbes.

Afternoon brings the sleepy doldrums and the benefits of napping. What better time for a discussion of stress, so different today from the fight or flight responses we were designed for. Chronic overdoses of stress hormones not only raise blood pressure but can also increase the rate at which food becomes fat. Stress can make us fat!

Nighttime insomnia occasions a thorough discussion of sleep that might just scare you into making time for more. Ackerman describes the process - rising levels of one hormone, falling levels of another, REM sleep and deep sleep and the cycles of each - and reviews the studies. Lack of sleep contributes to everything from stupidity to early death.

There's a self-help quality to the science, as Ackerman demonstrates the benefits of exercise, laughter, diet, sleep and adherence to our inner clock. Following the ebb and flow of chemicals and microbes through our bodies through the day, the arguments for healthy living make sense, although all these new studies (many of which will be familiar) are hemmed in with words like "suggests" or "indicates."

This will be a fascinating read for anyone curious to know more about what goes on inside our bodies, how this marvel of intricacy and balance all flows together, and what the individual can do to keep the rythmn healthy.

SEX SLEEP EAT DRINK DREAM is a wonderful amalgam of scientific fact, speculation, and personal observations about how we use our bodies and how they/we live in the world. The science is thorough and it is balanced by warm, delicate, elegant storytelling. Ms. Ackerman writes like an angel. I couldn't put it down, and have sent copies along to others. Highly recommended.

Jennifer Ackerman's writing is extremely important and couldn't be more timely. Science is exploding. This science--which we read about everyday--is confusing, difficult, and tedious to understand, and it is impossible for most people to place into the context of their normal everyday lives. Ms. Ackerman writes with extraordinary creativity--her words sing to you as you read them. In Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream: A Day in the Life of Your Body, she writes about the human body through our usual day. Ms. Ackerman takes complex physiology and brings it to life using poetry, imagery, and story so that you understand completely, both intellectually and viscerally, how the body works. Ms. Ackerman has a voice that is all her own and one that pushes the boundaries of non-fiction writing. Her voice is strong. Her writing is captivating. I absolutely loved Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream! I couldn't put it down. I can't wait for Ms. Ackerman's next book.