Faster

Gleick, James

ISBN 10: 037540886X ISBN 13: 9780375408861

Publisher: Random House, 1999

Synopsis

The best-selling author of Chaos and Genius presents an intriguing study of the human fascination with time from a psychological, biological, and cultural perspective tracing the development of measuring time and exploring ways in which we try to stretch our allotted time. Simultaneous.

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')

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 037540886X
• ISBN 13: 9780375408861
• Binding: Audio Cassette