T. S. Wiley

If you are a feminist this book might put your panties in a knot. But really she is a feminist so hang with her here and give this a read. Wiley looks at a woman's biological functions and how life has evolved on this planet as well as how far from those constraints we have come. Therein lies the problem according to Wiley. For example, she examines how we have electric lights now and stay up all night instead of going to bed when it's dark and this throws our biological clock off in show more addition to speeding up the aging of our body. Her argument is that we have to fool mother nature if we want to live as long as we are able--otherwise we are putting our bodies through too much and we become unhealthy and die as a result much faster than we need to. She posits that as we lose our natural hormones then that is mother nature's signal that we are a drain on her resources and must go to make way for the next generation. No baby boomer wants to hear that! At least I don't! She outlines in this book how to fool mother nature into thinking you are still young and able to procreate even if you aren't. Some of her methods will seem extreme to many of us but that is the price we must pay for long life that isn't just long but also healthy. I loved this book myself. I went through menopause before I was 40 years old and could feel my vim and vigor evaporate as a result. I wanted to do something about that besides get old, dried up and wrinkled, and this book showed me a path I could take. I do not do everything the way she outlines here. For one thing I can't find a doctor who is willing to go to these extremes yet and still get my insurance to pay for it. But I have been on bio identical hormones for several years now and I can attest that hormones account for our energy, drives and ability to think even! There is a prevalent line of thinking that hormones themselves cause cancer and the sooner we are done with them the better. This book explains why that thesis is a bunch of crap on a stick. It isn't natural hormones that are bad for you but the pharmaceutical industry's knock off of natural human hormones that are. Just imagine the fury that results when a lucrative industry is challenged. You are suddenly a quack. This author explains how hormones functions in our body, why they are necessary and how they get screwed up. READ THIS BOOK. show less

This book makes for some fantastical leaps from studying the cyclical obese Syrian desert rat a.o. to human physiology. Entertaining --yes, useful-- no. This belongs to one of many books that is partially useful and partially misleading. It's just very difficult to tell which is which.

The book basically says that humans are programmed to hibernate, and all the modern times metabolical diseases derive from artificial lights enabling us to keeping the same hours inthe short days of winter as we do in the long days of summer.
OK, so... I live right upon the Tropic of Capricorn. The difference between the hours of light in the summer solstice and in the winter solstice is negligible. This means none of it applies to me?
The book has some very interesting (and scary) things to show more say about serotonin, dopamin and antidepressants, but while testing its claims on diabetes, obesity and hours of sleep would be merely inconvenient, testing the ones on antidepressants would be positively dangerous. I'd really love to find other books on the same themes, just to make sure T. S. Wiley didn't just invented all that... show less

This book is kind of all over the place. Some neurochemistry, some evolutionary biology, some Gaia theory. I think there's definitely some insight here, and recent research backs up a lot of the claims made, but it definitely has to be taken with a grain of salt.

(That being said, I want a pair of rose-colored glasses to wear after sundown, just because that sounds awesome.)