- Hardcover: 240 pages
- Publisher: Viking Canada (Oct 11 2011)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0670065110
- ISBN-13: 978-0670065110
- Product Dimensions: 23.1 x 15.2 x 2.8 cm
- Shipping Weight: 431 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #10,794 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
Book Description
When a retiring worker is given a gold watch, Jessa Gamble observes, she symbolically gets back the freedom to keep her own hours.
There were no mechanical timepieces before the industrial revolution. The day’s activities were dictated by the spinning Earth’s circuit around the Sun and by the seasons. Because people adjusted their lives to these natural rhythms, they may have experienced less stress than their modern counterparts. They almost certainly enjoyed more sleep.
In The Siesta and the Midnight Sun, award-winning science writer Jessa Gamble explores the continuing significance of the biological clocks that governed our lives before modern technology annihilated the night. She describes experiments that show both rats and people adhere to a 24-hour schedule even when deprived of daylight. When our days are disrupted by shift work, jet lag or space travel, things go wrong. The disastrous chemical leak at Bhopal, India and the calamitous launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger both were caused partly by sleepless workers. Insomnia is rampant in the Western world.
By investigating patterns of behaviour in many societies both past and current, Gamble gives us a glimpse of different ways of scheduling time. In this superbly insightful and entertaining book she examines the crises and creative adaptations that occur on the embattled border where biology, culture and technology clash.
About the Author
JESSA GAMBLE was raised in England and studied at the University of Toronto. A dynamic new voice in popular science, Gamble was awarded a 2007 Science in Society journalism award from the Canadian Science Writers’ Association for her first-person account of daily life at the Eureka High Arctic Weather Station.
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Most helpful customer reviews
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
A few clippings,
This review is from: Siesta and the Midnight Sun: How Our Bodies Experience Time (Hardcover)
"Ultimately, The Siesta and the Midnight Sun is a lot like the biological processes it documents and deconstructs--utterly fascinating, but not always comfortable. And that's a good thing." -- BoingBoing"It is the combination of personal experience, science and cultural observation that makes this book much richer than any one-dimensional view of body time. And of course its appeal is all the greater because we all have our own personal stories to tell." -- Jay Ingram, host of Daily Planet "Ms. Gamble's exploration of how culture affects our natural rhythms runs the gamut from biology class to anthropological lesson. It also shares at least a few concerns and observations about how our 20th- and 21st-century habits have wreaked havoc on our internal clocks." -- National Post "It is no wonder that the Globe & Mail selected Gamble's book as one of five sleepers to watch for this fall - it is absolutely fascinating. Jessa Gamble's brilliant exploration of time with its focus on our biological rhythms and the perils of sleeplessness is sure to draw a large time-pressed readership." -- Northern News Service
4 of 7 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars
Nuggets,
By
This review is from: Siesta and the Midnight Sun: How Our Bodies Experience Time (Hardcover)
I saw the author's TED talk about sleep and got intrigued, so I bought the book; I was expecting revelations about sleep, and found some of the facts exposed in the book quite interesting. Unfortunately, they're drowned in a sea of bland personal stories; all in all, this 200-or-so page book could easily be distilled into 75 pages if that filler was removed - I don't need to read about the author's jet lag experiences (we *all* know the feeling), nor am I interested in her personal, redundant and unenlightening observations about people living under the midnight sun. Imperfections aside, when the author is really dealing with sleep and circadian cycle science, the book rocks.
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