The 4-Hour Body

I've listened to the tape which is abridged and now I'm curious enough to get the book from the library to see what I've missed.

I just wanted to read the sections on fat loss/the “slow carb diet” and the PAGG stack. Those were pretty informative and at generally the right level of detail that I require. The book is a good starting place for learning some of this stuff; if you try starting to learn about it by straight Googling, you're likely to get pretty overwhelmed pretty quickly.

That said, at least some (if not all/most) of the key material in the book is also on Ferriss' blog. For example, re: the basics of the slow carb diet: http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/04/06/how-to-lose-20-lbs-of-fat-in-30-days-without-doing-any-exercise/

However, the whole tone of this book is written as if you're an idiot, by a person who is not a very good writer. You really get the sense that Ferriss had to meet some kind of page/words quota and so he tried to meet it by including long excerpts from emails/writings by other people. It's a really palpably lazily put together book.

I was also interested in the exercise section, but as a kettlebell/weight-lifting n00b, I found it pretty confusing. (Although I didn't check the online references for further clarification.)

I skimmed the section on sex and it looked pretty worthless to me, plus obnoxiously heteronormative, but might be helpful to some.

Great stuff on food and exercise. The rest is sort of interesting but out of place. If you like Tim Ferriss you'll like the book, if not then you won't.