This book was a huge disappointment.

First of all, there was no coherent theme. The chapters of the book are divided into days. Each day begins with a little journal-type entry sharing how the author thinks or feels during the days of his week-long fast. It is then followed up by a random topic like: Quiet Places, fasting in Abrahamic traditions, fasting as protest, or fasting frauds and fads.

For each of the topics, the author doesn't go deep but rather broad. He will cover a LOT of material, but only on the surface level, and quite often the material he covered was misleading, outdated, or downright wrong. In part, I don't really blame Oakes for that. By all accounts, it seems like he was just summarizing a bunch of Wikipedia articles or other top-page internet results from his Google search. It felt like he was skipping from one article to the next wherever his stream of consciousness would take him but had about as much concern for the truth of those articles as might ChatGPT. When talking about both the Abrahamic traditions, Buddhism, or the ancient Greek Philosophers, I would quite often find myself thinking, "That's a misquote" or, "You're taking that out of context and drawing the wrong implications." This is what happens when someone never goes deeper than a Wikipedia article about the subject they are discussing. This is what happens when investigative journalism is outsourced to amateurs "investigating" from their living room couch with a good internet connection and the TV on in front of them.

I guess for a world where truth is learned through the infinite scrolling of TikTok, this book might be a step up. But if someone is looking for a real book about fasting... keep looking. You have not found it here.

Unfortunately, this book was far from what I expected. Even though it is filled with historical background on fasting, it feels hollow. Empty, like just reading some Wikipedia pages. The references are not indicated in the text, which makes it very difficult to fact check, something I felt like I needed to do often. From minor things like the (incorrect) definition of narcolepsy, to the one-sided simplified view of Anorexia nervosa, I feel like the author researched a lot, but can't connect it to their own experience. The writing is needlessly complicated, with many bloated words. There's constant switching between wether fasting is healthy or not. I understand the research is inconclusive, but then acknowledge that. I feel bad, disliking a work where obviously so much time has gone in to, but this really needs to be said. I actually found the small introductions to each chapter where the author describes their seven-day fasts the most fun to read. And I guess that shows what I had expected and hoped to read.