Timekeepers: How the World Became Obsessed With Time

Garfield, Simon

ISBN 10: 1782113215 / ISBN 13: 9781782113218

Published by Canongate Books, 2018

About this Item

Gut/Very good: Buch bzw. Schutzumschlag mit wenigen Gebrauchsspuren an Einband, Schutzumschlag oder Seiten. / Describes a book or dust jacket that does show some signs of wear on either the binding, dust jacket or pages. Seller Inventory # M01782113215-V

Bibliographic Details

Title: Timekeepers: How the World Became Obsessed ...

Publisher: Canongate Books

Publication Date: 2018

Binding: Soft cover

Condition: very good

About this title

Synopsis:

Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana. The Beatles learn to be brilliant in an hour and a half. An Englishman arrives back from Calcutta but refuses to adjust his watch. Beethoven has his symphonic wishes ignored. A US Senator begins a speech that will last for 25 hours. The horrors of war are frozen at the click of a camera. A woman designs a ten-hour clock and reinvents the calendar. Roger Bannister lives out the same four minutes over a lifetime. And a prince attempts to stop time in its tracks.

Timekeepers is a book about our obsession with time and our desire to measure it, control it, sell it, film it, perform it, immortalise it and make it meaningful. It has two simple intentions: to tell some illuminating stories, and to ask whether we have all gone completely nuts.

Review:

"Digressive, gossipy, thoughtful and thoroughly entertaining" (The Sunday Times)

"Thoroughly enjoyable and illuminating . . . Stuffed with fascinating material" (Observer)

"A sort of museum between hard covers. Timekeepers is as good as pop history gets" (Sunday Express)

"Time well spent . . . Simon Garfield has made his name as an author who can spin fascinating narratives out of subjects that seem, on the face of it, narrow to the point of being dull" (Financial Times)

"Scholarly but jokey, with a magpie's appetite for glittering trivia, Garfield is as eager to amuse as to inform, and achieves both" (Telegraph)

"An eclectic collection of explorations of our relationships with time . . . Very readable" (The Times)

"Delightful" (Sunday Telegraph)

"Delightful . . . Gloriously funny . . . Garfield has an astonishing capacity for meticulous research and a wonderful ability to select the best stories to entertain us" (Daily Express)

"Engaging . . . Engrossing" (Mail on Sunday)

"In this book, brilliant cultural historian Simon Garfield assembles a host of intriguing characters who have tried to bend time to their own rules, and questions how we came to be ruled by something so arbitrary" (Elle)