Faster: Our Race Against Time (Hardcover)

Author of the pop-science triumph, Chaos, James Gleick brings his formidable writing skills to bear here, creating an almost poetic flow of ideas from what in other hands might have been just amass of interesting facts and anecdotes. Whether tracing the modern history of chronometry (from Louis-François Cartier's invention of the wristwatch to the staggeringly precise atomic clocks of today's standards bureaus) or revealing the ways the camera has sped up our subjective sense of pace (from the freeze frames of Eadweard Muybridge's early photographic experiments to the jump cuts of MTV's latest videos), Gleick manages to weave in slyly perceptive oroccasionally profound points about our increasingly hopped-uprelationship to time. The result is the kind of thing only an accelerated culture like ours could have come up with: an instant classic. --Julian Dibbell, Amazon.com

Review
'A bite sized, zippy little book is packed with myriad manifestations of the Need for Speed' EXPRESS ** 'A book that you can dip in and out of at will, always coming up with an intriguing fact or statistic' SUNDAY TIMES **'Gleick offers a lot of witty observation that's worth more than a few of your precious minutes' FOCUS 'Reveals the growth of hurry sickness' OBSERVER ** ' A highly readable dissection of our speed-obsessed age' THE FACE

By Gleick's high standards, this is an ordinary book. By the standards of anybody else, it is well above average. The problem Gleick has created for himself is that his first two books, Chaos and Genius dealt with subjects that had not, at the time, been worked over by other authors. So his skill as a writer brought completely new stories to a new audience. Faster is a much more mundane idea - one of the many vaguely millennial books dealing with time, the way we measure it and the way we seem to have to run faster and faster in order to stay in the same place. Gleick does it very well, but you can't help feeling that this is a waste of rare talent. (Kirkus UK)

In a hurry? This book will tell why - and how our times became so time-obsessed. After a visit to the Directorate of Time, the US agency responsible for determining the exact time, Gleick (Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, 1992, etc.) examines that symbol of the man in a hurry, the Type A personality. As it turns out, the study that gave us that symbol was badly flawed, and yet the symbol was so apt that it has stuck with us. Time pressure weighs on us all, so that waiting - for anything - has become not an opportunity to look around and see what's going on, but a nuisance to be gotten out of the way. The "close door" button on the elevator - which may or may not really do anything - is a symbol of that burry, and it leads to a discussion of elevator technology, which leads to a discussion of how the wristwatch displaced the pocket watch, and how the watch became electronic, and how it has become more than just a timepiece. This free-association organization allows Gleick to cover a wide range of subjects, one short chapter at a time. So we get an examination of H.G. Wells's Prof. Gibberne, who invented a potion to allow himself to live at high speed, and a history of stop-motion photography, which for the first time allowed the analysis of actions too fast for the eye to grasp in their details. The phrase "real time" comes in for dissection, and Gleick makes the point that it describes something for which we didn't need a word before the computer made it necessary. The book goes on to examine such modern phenomena as time and motion analysis, the quick-cut editing style of MTV videos, telephone redial buttons, multitasking, and dozens of other fascinating offshoots of our obsession with time. Lively, detailed, and briskly written - this book is a fount of interesting information. Well worth your time. (Kirkus Reviews) --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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• Books > Science & Nature > Experiments, Instruments & Measurements > Time
• Books > Society, Politics & Philosophy > Social Sciences > Cultural Studies

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