Considering that we all spend around one‐third of our lives doing it, surprisingly little is known about sleep. As with so many other things, we tend to take it for granted until something goes wrong, and then we get into a flap. Even in this monstrous volume – over a thousand pages and barely portable (not the sort of thing you can easily tuck under your pillow), only the first seventy pages or so of text, plus a few of the introductory paragraphs to other sections, are devoted to normal sleep. Most of it is, inevitably, about abnormal sleep and sleep‐related disorders.
The target readership here is quite clearly the clinician rather than the patient. I have among my readers clinical psychologists, neurologists, and psychiatrists who will be eagerly looking through relevant sections of this book as soon as I let them loose on a copy. There are 137 chapters, divided into seventeen sections – ranging from straightforward Insomnia and Excessive Sleepiness round to Movement Disorders (restless legs syndrome, etc), sleep problems in other medical disorders, and sleep in various special groups – Sleep Among Women (I know what they mean, but I am sure they could have phrased it differently), sleep at high altitudes, etc., and a final dozen technical chapters on assessment methodology. There is a lot of very interesting material here – I got sidetracked into a fascinating account of non‐24‐hour circadian rhythms in people who are born blind. One surprising omission I noticed, as a concerned foster‐parent, is the lack of a chapter focussed directly on the sleeping patterns of adolescents – there is a chapter on The Student with Sleep Complaints and a dozen chapters on various sleep‐related problems in infants and young children, but I did not notice a section on the bizarre habits of 16‐year‐old boys (let alone the knock‐on effects on the sleep of the carers. The chapter on Sleep and the Caregiver is mainly devoted to people caring for the elderly or the chronically ill.)
For the most part, the general reader would get bogged down in technicalities, so I would not particularly recommend this book to public reference libraries. A high level of scientific knowledge is assumed, and if the authors had not crammed in so many abbreviations the book would have been even longer and heavier. There are numerous smaller (and cheaper) books on sleep available, which are scientifically sound but are more accessible to the general reader. I have been advised that the new edition of Shneerson (2005), which I have not seen yet, is very useful, and my customers regularly seem to use Perlis (2003) for the more behavioural aspects of sleep. I would very strongly recommend this book to medical libraries and libraries catering for clinical psychologists however. For general purposes I would draw particular attention to the editor's preface, where, in 25 pages, he summarizes the entire content of this book in a masterly manner. I would like to see the preface put up, free of charge, on the web as “Everything that scientists really know about sleep”, referring on to the main text for experts who want to delve deeper, rather than see these pages lost as an opening section that most specialist readers will ignore.
