Faster: Our Race Against Time - Softcover

Gleick, James

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0349112924 ISBN 13: 9780349112923

Publisher: Abacus, 2005

Synopsis

Time rules our lives. The frenetic purpose - more than we want to admit, is to save time. Think of one of those conveniences that best convey the most elemental feeling of power over the passing seconds: the microwave oven. In your hurry sickness, you may find yourself punching 88 seconds instead of 90 because it is faster to tap the same digit twice. Do you stand at the microwave for that minute and a half? Or is that long enough to make a quick call or run in the next room to finish paying a bill? If haste is the gas pedal for the pace of our lives, then multi-tasking is overdrive. FASTER dissects with acute insight and mordant wit our unceasing daily struggle to squeeze as much as we can - but never enough - into the 1440 minutes of each day.
Speed is the key strategy for saving time, and James Gleick shows us how in just about every area - from business cycle time to beeper medicine, from Federal Express to quick playback buttons on answering machines, from the pace of television to our growing need to do two things at once, how speed has become the experience we all have in common - it, more than the message, is what connects us.

About this title

Review

Never in the history of the human race have so many had so much to do in so little time. That, anyway, is the impression most of us have of civilised life at the end of the millennium, and Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything only sharpens it. Elegantly composed and insightfully researched, Faster delivers a brisk volley of observations on how microchips, media and economics, among otherthings, have accelerated the pace of everyday experience over thecourse of the manic 20th century.

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 (DAILY 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)

It's an important portrait of an age; a learned, witty, eclectic treatise, and it might even help you to slow down. So don't hang around- go out and buy it right now. (OBSERVER ‘A highly readable dissection of our speed-obsessed age’)

Edition details

• Publisher: Abacus
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0349112924
• ISBN 13: 9780349112923
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 338