ABOUT TIME [Paperback]

Jack Finney (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 13, 1986

ABOUT TIME offers a delightful return to the world of time travel and light comedy that distinguished Jack Finney's all-time classic TIME AND AGAIN. The protagonists of these 12 stories are well-meaning but at odds with their surroundings and their lives. The time to which they escape-through time travel-doesn't fulfill their expectations in the way they had hoped, but sometimes they find their dreams.

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Fireside (August 13, 1986)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0671628879
• ISBN-13: 978-0671628871
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,802,747 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

62 of 63 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The time-travel pioneer's classic shorts, December 21, 2001

By 

Brian Melendez (Minneapolis, MN United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: About Time: 12 Short Stories (Paperback)

Jack Finney, writing in the late 1950s and early 1960s, was hardly the first writer who explored time travel; after all, H.G. Wells wrote "The Time Machine" more than half a century earlier, and that classic was already being turned into a movie as Finney was writing his short stories. But Finney defined the time-travel story as no other writer has. When you read these stories, they will seem familiar to you--perhaps because you have read them before, as many of them have appeared in other anthologies; but perhaps because so many other writers have imitated Finney, all without surpassing him.

Here you will find "The Third Level," about a mysterious platform in Grand Central Station that leads into another world (a precursor of "Level Nine and Three-quarters" in the "Harry Potter" books). And "Of Missing Persons," the classic tale of lost faith and missed opportunities. And "The Coin Collector," about alternate realities, where "a Woodrow Wilson dime" reveals that "every once in a while something from one of these worlds . . . will stray into another one."

Jack Finney wasn't the first, but he was the best. His stories weave together O. Henry's story-telling talent (and surprise-twist endings), Rod Serling's imagination, and Ray Bradbury's skill at juxtaposing the familiar with the slightly terrifying. This book's stories are a treat.

32 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Fun read but a little disappointing, December 9, 1999

By 

David Savage - See all my reviews

This review is from: About Time: 12 Short Stories (Paperback)

After reading "Time and Again", From Time to Time", and "Forgotten News" I was little disappointed with this book. What I love about Jack Finney is his rich and detailed descriptions of the past. The reader, in a sense, becomes the time traveler. These stories are more of a play on the time travel theme with little of the vivid detail and character that I found in the other books.

That said, "About Time" is definitely a fun read. The stories reminded me of Twilight Zone episodes. "The Face in the Photo" in particular was my favorite where a detective finds his most "at-large" criminals in pictures and newsreels from the past.

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A collection of clever stories, August 23, 2003

By 

Debra Hamel (North Haven, CT) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: About Time: 12 Short Stories (Paperback)

The twelve stories in this collection by the author of Invasion of the Body Snatchers were originally published in 1957 and 1962. The stories are similar to Finney's classic novel Time and Again--in which the book's protagonist travels back to late 19th-century New York--both because nearly all of them have to do with time travel ("Lunch-Hour Magic" and "Home Alone" are exceptions) and because many of the characters express their dissatisfaction with the modern world and wish to escape from it. Usually this flight from modernity is to be achieved by time travel, but it can also take the form of interplanetary migration ("Of Missing Persons") or balloon flight ("Home Alone").

Time travel in these stories is achieved almost effortlessly, when the "thousand invisible chains" that keep us in the present--modern coins and manufactured items, apartment buildings--are, for a moment, loosed. If there's nothing on you that wouldn't belong in the world fifty or sixty or seventy years ago, and if you're in a place that hasn't been altered much in all that time, and if you're in the right frame of mind, you can slip into the past, easy as can be. Just so, the car-obsessed college student of Finney's "Second Chance," while driving along an old highway in his restored Jordan Playboy, finds himself sharing the road with Model T's. His brief presence in the past has the effect of altering history in a way that will influence his own future.

Al and his wife Nell of Finney's "Such Intersting Neighbors" find the Hellenbeks, who have just moved into their California neighborhood, strange but pleasant. Ted Hellenbek is an inventor, an intelligent guy who was born and raised in the U.S., and yet he fumbles with his money, unable to count it out himself, when he has to pay the driver of his cab upon his arrival in town. Alfred Pullen buys a paper with a 1958 Wilson dime in "The Coin Collector" and finds himself at once in an alternative universe where such coins exist--and where he has married a different woman. In "Where the Cluetts Are" an architect helps a couple build a house following blueprints that belonged to his grandfather. The house, with its peaked roof and many gables, is an anachronism, and it has a curious effect on its inhabitants. In "Lunch-Hour Magic" an advertising agency employee buys a pair of glasses that allow him to see through women's clothes:

"I kept the glasses on nearly all afternoon, wandering around the office with a sheaf of papers in my hand, and strangely it was Mrs. Humphrey, our middle-aged overweight bookkeeper, that I stared at longest. Last year, I knew, she'd celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of her marriage to her husband, Harvey. But there, unmistakably, tattooed on her left hip, was a four-inch high red heart inside which, in a slanted blue script, was inscribed Ralph, and I wondered if she'd had the fearsome job of hiding it from Harvey for a quarter of a century."

Finney writes well--that "fearsome job" is quite good--and his stories are clever. If they are not quite as well done as his novels, this collection nevertheless makes a pleasant and easy read.

Reviewed by Debra Hamel, author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece