On Monday evening I went along to Town Hall Seattle for a talk by Jennifer Ackerman, author of the new book Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream: A Day in the Life of Your Body. I’ve posted a review at Amazon.com, but since they filtered out the hyperlinks I’ll repeat it here with edits restored:
A useful summary of the state of the science for the lay audience
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.
I rated it four stars. ((I just had an odd thought: buy this and read it just before the holiday season this year, and I guarantee you’ll never run out of fascinating conversation pieces.))
As for the meeting itself, it was a typical book tour session, and none the worse for that. The audience was smaller than I expected; there was another event taking place elsewhere in Town Hall, and I suspect that the crowd of Town Hall regulars was split as a result. No matter; I enjoyed it very much, and I hope Ms. Ackerman did too. She didn’t say much about the “sex” in the book; I told her afterwards that we’d had Steven Pinker a few weeks ago, and even the most graphic comments on the subject would seem tame after his presentation on swearing…