Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything [Hardcover]

James Gleick (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 17, 1999

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.

Editorial Reviews

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

From Publishers Weekly

Technological advances in time measurement and time-saving devices have been fueled by the ever-quickening pace of our lives. Or is it the other way around? Gleick, twice nominated for the National Book Award (for Chaos: Making a New Science and Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman), offers a refreshingly contrarian view of the notion of time management and of the instantaneity ("instant coffee, instant intimacy, instant replay, and instant gratification") of everyday life. Many of us exhibit what doctors and sociologists call "hurry sickness"Aarriving, for example, at an airport gate at the last possible minuteAan obsession ironically matched by endless waits on expressways and runways. "Gridlocked and Tarmacked are metonyms of our era," writes Gleick, "...to be stuck in place, our fastest engines idling all around us, as time passes and blood pressures rise." This paradox, and the "simultaneous fragmentation and overloading of human attention" that results, he contends, can be traced to a wide variety of everyday conveniences: microwaves and automatic dishwashers, express mail, beeper medicine, television remote control, even speed-dialing telephones ("Investing a half-hour in learning to program them is like advancing a hundred dollars to buy a year's supply of light bulbs at a penny discount"). Funny and irreverent, Gleick pinpoints the dilemma underlying many of today's technological improvements: that time-saving now comes more from "the tautening net of efficiency" than from raw speed, meaning that any snag in the systemAwhether a disabled airliner or one or two drivers unaccountably hitting the brakeAcan spread delay and confusion throughout the network. Paradoxically, too, the increasing pace and efficiency of our lives leads not to leisure and relaxation but to increased boredom: "a backwash within another mental state, the one called mania." This is a book to be studied... slowly. (Sept.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon; 1ST edition (August 17, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679408371
• ISBN-13: 978-0679408376
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.7 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (65 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #984,913 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars THE book for the millennium, October 31, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything (Hardcover)

The writing is cool and sometimes hilarious. The subject matter is US. Some of Gleick's readers seem flabbergasted he did not write Chaos all over again. This is different, not a science book at all, and daring to let us look again at things we thought we already knew.

The organization is brilliant too. After a while you think of a juggler, setting one ball after another in motion, until there's just a blur. But then one by one he pulls them all back in. By the end you realize what's happened before your very eyes. The chapter on the "Law of Small Numbers" alone is worth the price of the book - a gem.

Of everything I've read this year, this is the one I find myself thinking about again and again.

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing, January 17, 2000

By 

Denise Lee (Singapore) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything (Hardcover)

Although there are interesting little tidbits, it seems like the book doesn't have much of an argument nor does it tell us anything new apart from the usual "people get too caught up in the speed of the information age"-type thing. A lot of the things he mentions are almost too obvious. The book's message seems to be simply "Maybe you should slow down". But there are no solutions offered, nor did I need to read an entire book to get this message. Buy Chaos instead if you haven't already.

36 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not Gleick's best, January 3, 2000

By 

Tyler Green - See all my reviews

This review is from: Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything (Hardcover)

This seems like the perfect topic for the times. The cover is catchy, the writer excels at making seemingly abstract topics topical (Chaos is superb) and he's gives great NPR. The first chapter or two, which I read before buying the book, was mesmerizing. That made my disappointment with Faster all the greater.

Gleick writes a series of great short newspaper-length stories, binds them together and calls it a book. To be sure, there is a bevy of fascinating factoids here. But Gleick never really creates a thesis and never really advances any particular argument. Some of the scenes he paints are memorable, but nothing really holds them together as a book. I tried to overcome that by reading a chapter a day on the subway and not even that worked. It's almost like he's trying to write a "fast" book that the reader can zip through. Well, in that area he succeeds, but in so doing he fails to move the book in any particular direction.

Gleick is a well-known writer with a good track record. I'm sure sales of this book have been good. But I hope that doesn't stop someone else from tackling a similar subject.