Wonderful - Rated 
I kind of fell in love with Jay Griffiths as I read this. It made me feel like I want to use the rest of however much time I have left rather differently. Preferably with far less emphasis on clocks and watches. Dreamy, beautiful. Take no notice of the one star brigade. If they don't get it they are to be pitied.
The Time of your Life - Rated 
Pip Pip is a miscellany of information that, despite inaccuracies (Marshall Sahlins is an anthropologist, not a biologist) and exaggerations, still makes some good points about the nature of time and how it claws us into its devouring clutch. Childhood, Jay Griffiths reminds us, seems so long because a child's metabolism is so much faster than that of an adult, so that a day that vanishes swiftly for a pensioner stretches forever for a child. Women, she tells us, follow lunar cycles - the paramenstruum leaves women burning with creativity, witch-like with intuition and violent moods. Some of us, of course, just get cramps, take painkillers, and go to bed.
Women, children, nature - all follow a cyclical wild time, a play-time, which is opposed to the horrid masculine linearity of clock time. The author contrasts modern and pre-modern societies. Western societies are estranged from nature, have contempt for animals and fear death instead of welcoming it. She laments the days when death was a communal affair, with friends and relatives gathered round. She hates the measuring of childbirth, the changing definitions of what is and is not a slow labour, the timing and efficiency of hospital wards. We should all be in tune with nature, with the natural rhythm of the seasons - instead of destroying our world with pollution stemming from capitalist greed. Industrialised work-patterns are twinned with consumption. Time, everyone's most precious commodity, is measured so that it can be snatched away from us.
So far, so good, but Griffiths's polemic proceeds by constructing ideological Aunt Sallies that she can toss comments at, without any real evaluation of what is and was going on. Her references to Karl Marx ignore his aversion to the division of labour, as a cause of alienation, and disregard the dilettante Utopia described in The German Ideology (1846), in which men fish, hunt and write literary criticism without adopting any occupational rôle. Her bête noire is Christianity (both Catholic and Protestant). She has a particular dislike of the rule of Saint Benedict, with its task-oriented division of the various hours of the day. She also detests Christianity's rejection of reincarnation, and attempted control of the natural world.
These arguments disregard the fact that cycles may slowly change, run down or be broken; more importantly, they display romanticism and ignorance of what life may be like in pre-modern societies. Living in tune with Nature, in a place where Nature is to be feared as well as enjoyed, has a vitality that makes humans feel part of the natural world. Yet people in such societies often suffer terribly: starvation, hunger, death in childbirth, birth defects, and painful degenerative diseases. As for social relations, war, infanticide, cannibalism and the abandonment of the elderly, were near-normative in many places, as were boredom and frustration, with the recognition of wasted abilities. Life in undeveloped societies was and is qualitatively different, but not necessarily better, than a comfortable healthy life in the West.
Written in an amusing and sometimes breathless style, Pip Pip's descriptions of scent and flower clocks, of astronomical and other historical clocks, of different perceptions of time, are most enjoyable. But they offer no workable solutions to the real problems of the modern world.
One of the best books I have ever read - Rated
Now that might seem a bit extreme - but it quite simply is one of the best books I have ever read. The poetic style weaves stories around you so that you have to become absorbed. Jay captures really important and complex issues and presents them to the reader in a beautifully accessible, sometimes rude, sometime very funny, style. I read the book ages ago - and was moved to write a review after looking to buy a copy for a friend and seeing the rather strange negative review. This is a book for people who want to think and who are open to the idea that there may be more than one way of looking at the world.
Perfect read - Rated
Has the previous reviewer actually read the book in question? This book is fascinating, perspective altering, and well written. I can only assume that the reviewer that gave it one star is reviewing a different book, or is extremely thick - Griffiths actually refutes traditional Christian concepts of time. It is the perfect non-fiction read for anyone interested in 'Time' as a mutable idea, rather than concrete reality.
Disappoiniting waste of time - Rated 
I'm afraid I found this a real hard slog. Like a stodgy, self-indulgent porridge-pot. Though I think that gives the author too much credit. If you want to be preached at or patronised by a rather unsubtle, over-earnest Christian-type then this is the book for you, otherwise give it a miss. Really. Go out and do something less boring instead.
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