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Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything
by James Gleick
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Pantheon (1999-08-17)
ISBN: 0679408371
EAN: 9780679408376
Dewy Decimal #: 529.7
Hardcover: 336 pages
Release Date: 1999-08-17
SKU: CH1216
Condition: Used: Good
Comments: Publisher: Pantheon Date of Publication: August 17, 1999 Binding: Hardcover Condition: Good condition Description: 0-679-40837-1 Item in good condition from non-smoking home.
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
Synchronize your watches.
We have reached the epoch of the nanosecond. This is the heyday of speed.
If one quality defines our modern, technocratic age, it is acceleration. We are making haste. Our computers, our movies, our sex lives, our prayers -- they all run faster now than ever before. And the more we fill our lives with time-saving devices and time-saving strategies, the more rushed we feel.
In Faster, James Gleick explores nothing less than the human condition at the turn of the millennium. He shines a light of enterprising and analytical reporting -- as well as sly wit -- on the newest paradoxes of time. His journey takes us through the bunkers and trenches of a war we barely knew we were fighting: to the atomic clocks of the Directorate of Time, to the waiting rooms that focus our impatience, to the film production studios that test the high-speed limits of our perception, to the air-traffic command centers that give time pressure new meaning.
We have become a quick-reflexed, multitasking, channel-flipping, fast-forwarding species. We don't completely understand it, and we're not altogether happy about it. Faster is a mirror held up to our times -- and a mordant reminder of why some things take time.
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Amazon.com 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 civilized 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 other things, have accelerated the pace of everyday experience over the course 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 a mass 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 or occasionally profound points about our increasingly hopped-up relationship 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
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Customer Reviews
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A bit of a disappointment
Rating  (3)
Date: 2008-05-10
Having read Chaos, I was surprisingly disappointed with Faster. Gleick seemed to want to write about so many things, but never really had much more than a few short factoids about each. I was rather disappointed to find whole chapters of a topic comprising less than FOUR pages of text. Yes, this book is a fast read. So, for the person who seeks notches on his bookshelf, this is certainly a book for you! Of course Gleick discusses some very intriguing items concerning time, but unfortunately his execution falls a bit short of his other work.
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entertaining collection of observations
Rating  (4)
Date: 2007-11-27
Jam-packed with information and covering subjects that range from Richard Feynman's observations of theoretical physics to the rise of MTV, this book reads, well, fastly. I got a kick out of it and learned a lot. It has a very large number of chapters which are not always that closely tied together, but maybe an obvious point is that that is the intent of the author, to make the book read like modern Western society, with information flying at you from all directions. If so, that may make the book a little harder to get in to and less conventional in style, but it also makes it more original, and in a sense, more logical because it is consistent with its own theme. Author of Adjust Your Brain: A Practical Theory for Maximizing Mental Health.
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Faster: A List of Facts and Speculations
Rating  (2)
Date: 2006-12-29
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
I obviously did not conducting enough research before buying this book. I am seventeen and this was an easy read, but I was hoping for and expecting a philosophical examination of our speedy lives. Instead I was bombarded by semi-interesting, useless facts about how our world has been struck by "hurry-sickness" and how everything has been accelerated (a fairly obvious fact).
If you are consious enough of our world to buy this book (because of its title) for yourself, it will not raise you conciousness with any deep philosophical questions or with any solutions. The only people who will benefit from this book are the ones who will never buy it for themselves. Therefore I believe this book is basically useless and slightly boring.
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I disagreed with the entire premise of this book
Rating (2)
Date: 2006-07-09
4 out of 6 customers found this reveiw helpful
Gleick would like us to feel that everything, EVERYTHING is going faster. Ultimately, whetever you are doing now, it will happen faster tomorrow.
Sure, life is getting faster, but that's not the ultimate goal. People want to do MORE, they do not want to simply go faster.
To ignore the need for more is to miss the entire point of why we want to do some things faster: so that we have the leisure to do other things more slowly! I would like to finish my work faster so I have more time to cook a gourmet meal. I like to commute via bicycle so I can combine my workout and commute, but I certainly don't rush!
This book has a lot of anecdotal data, which is all very interesting, but doesn't amount to much. Some of the individual chapters give very detailed analysis of specific people or technologies, but Gleick never pulls it all together.
In short, interesting data, but not enough to support his position. And certainly not nearly enough to appease a skeptic.
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" The faster we are forced to go, the slower we may need to go"
Rating (4)
Date: 2006-05-01
This book has a lot of insights about various ways in which the ' pace of life and learning' have since the Scientific Revolution accelerated. In other words it is a book which gives one much to think about.
The problem is that it also suggests that given the vast increase of information available to us, the vast increase in 'possible alternatives' for our attention, that we will probably have our minds moved away from the insights so rapidly as to not even absorb them.
The obvious reply to such an intense barrage upon our consciousness, is to withdraw. And when we withdraw and close out all that is accelerating around us, we begin to try and make a pace and story of our own within ourselves.
The faster we are forced to go, the slower we may need to go.
I think a companion volume , or perhaps a contradictory volume should be written on all those human activities which might be aided by our ' going slower in them'. And along with this volume should be advice and recommendation of how to keep out of our life these seemingly endless intrusions which disrupt our living by our own rhythm.
"Run slowly, slowly horses of the night".
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