Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The author awoke one night having painfully sleepwalked into a wall. After incurring what must have been a substantial medical bill for a series of tests to determine the cause, he is assured that he is fine. The author knew very well that sleepwalking into walls isn't fine at all. He then set out to become an expert on the various aspects of sleep. The result is this rather quirky book consisting of thirteen chapters, each devoted to a different aspect of the issue, ranging from apnea machines to whether your baby should sleep with you. The book can generally be divided into two parts: the ludicrousness of ignoring sleep's importance, and sleep taken so seriously it has become big business. While the reader is provided information that may be of help in understanding any sleep related problem he or she suffers from, this is not the purpose of the book. Instead, the book is a very enthusiastic ramble (pilgrimage?) through the various facets of sleep, a subject rarely studied until recently. "This is not your typical advice book filled with ten easy steps to perfect sleep. But you will come away with a new understanding of all that goes on in your body while you are sleeping and what happens when you neglect sleep for too long." Each chapter follows a similar arc. Following a catchy chapter heading like Between the Sheets is a stock photo somewhat related to the chapter, in this case a picture of two sets of feet...between the sheets. Definite points off for these inexcusably lame photos that add absolutely nothing to the book. After the photo we are given a vignette, usually of a person, with a dilemma or quest. For example, how a professional baseball trainer decides that sleep deprivation is a problem for his pitchers and what he can do about it (naps!). This personal interest component then leads to the subject matter of the chapter. Between the Sheets, for example, primarily examines whether people sleep better alone or with a partner. We are then given interesting factoids on the subject and too many tangents that feel like the publisher told him the book wasn't long enough and he needed to puff it out another 100 pages. Despite these drawbacks, I recommend this book to anyone interested in, but clueless about, the science and business of sleep. If you are interested in the psychoanalytic aspects of sleep, and particularly dreams, this is definitely not the book for you. Stringing together research and comments by various scientists he thoroughly debunks Freudian ideas on the subject. A typical quote: "None of Freud's claims are true by any of our standards today." I have no idea whether this is entirely justified, just passing on what I read. I certainly wouldn't want my review to keep you from reading the book, but for those with only a minor interest in the subject, here are my favorite sleep factoids from the book (and all are direct quotes): - Depression rates were forty times higher for patients with insomnia than those without sleep problems. - If sleep doesn't serve an absolutely vital function, it is the greatest mistake evolution ever made. That function is still a mystery. - Sleep is made up of five distinct stages that the body cycles through over roughly ninety-minute periods. - Before the discovery of rapid eye movements, our understanding of sleep hadn't undergone any dramatic revisions in more than two thousand years. - By 2011 there were over seventy-five recognized sleep disorders, and the number continues to grow. - Adult bodies are not built to sleep past noon. - Architects and construction companies surveyed by the National Association of Home Builders predict that by 2016 more than half of all new custom-built homes in the United States will have separate master bedrooms. - About one in fifteen parents [in the U.S.] admitted to sharing a bed with their child in a study published in 1993. By 2007, the number had grown to about one in three. - Those who have lost their sight after they were toddlers continue to dream with images, for instance, while those who were blind from birth dream with sounds. - If you can't get in a full night's sleep, you can still improve the ability of your brain to synthesize new information by taking a nap. - In the Gulf War, one of every four American combat deaths was a result of fire from U.S. forces. [sleep deprivation being a major contributing cause] - Almost all cases of sleep crime involve men. - Somewhere inside the cells of most living things is what amounts to a fairly accurate twenty-four-hour clock, known as the circadian rhythm. - Sleep, for instance, is the time when the body sends growth hormones to repair damaged muscles. - Studies of teenagers around the globe have found that adolescent brains do not start releasing melatonin until around eleven o'clock at night and keep pumping out the hormone well past sunrise. Adults, meanwhile, have little-to-no melatonin in their bodies when they wake up. - Sleep apnea was the cause of thirty-eight thousand fatal heart attacks and strokes in the United States each year. - A study in 1994 found that about 10 percent of women, and 25 percent of men, have difficulties breathing in their sleep. These numbers climb as a person gets older, so that as many as one out of three elderly men have at least a mild case of sleep apnea. All told, about twenty million Americans have the disorder. - Two of every five adults in the United States have problems falling and staying asleep that aren't related to a persistent sleep disorder. - By 2010, about one in every four adults in the United States had a prescription sleeping pill in their medicine cabinets. But here's the twist. A number of studies have shown that drugs like Ambien and Lunesta offer no significant improvement in the quality of sleep that a person gets. They give only a tiny bit more in the quantity department, too. - The best predictor of quality sleep was maintaining a room temperature in a narrow band between 60 and 66 degrees Fahrenheit.