Customer Reviews

Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(14)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I really wanted to enjoy this book, particularly because Chaos has been so well received, and at the beginning of Faster my expectations were met. Gleick does an excellent job of describing how time, and perhaps the lack of it, has become the universal feature of modern society. Moreover, I believe his premise that technology has created more pressure upon its users, rather than alleviating already existing stresses. Unfortunately, Faster provides only a description of the problem, rather than offer an explanation of why it occurs or how we can shift our collective focus from the clock to something more rewarding.

Most criticism surrounding this book moans, "We already know this stuff." That is largely true, especially for those of us who spend our workdays pinned in front of a VDU, batting back email like tennis balls. But I also agree with what one well-known author (his name hangs just off the tongue) said about books that tell us what we already know: They're often the best kind. I like to know I'm not alone. For me, FASTER was confirmation of a collective human angst that itches just below society's surface; I could only think, Someone has finally SAID it--not in the usual broad, philosophical way, but with here-and-now details. Gleick's research uncovers the workings of the speed machine down to its smallest cogs--bits of insight I found, if not enlightening, certainly amusing. FASTER gives us a chance to see the puzzle and laugh at it at the same time.

The book is not meaningfully organized, nor does the author offer much in the way of solutions to the problem he illustrates. As much as I enjoyed the book, I also wanted more and wondered how the argument could have been better presented--with this topic, you could go almost anywhere. Overall, though, I don't think another book exists that goes into the nuts and bolts of how our fast-forward world works. FASTER, though not a masterpiece, nevertheless is an important work: We as a society are careening toward gridlock unless we can understand these processes and do something about them. Living in today's information age has been likened to trying to drink from a firehose. How fast do we have to go?

I thoroughly enjoyed this book.

Gleick takes us back before time was measured, discusses a reaction or two to the invention of the sundial, and then brings us to the hurried pace of our era. With all the talk about efficiency, needing to be on-time and up-to-the-minute with everything, stress, Prozac, antacids, wanting it all overnight, we've needed someone to take a step back and present us with the "big picture."

Yes, things are moving faster and will continue to do so. But as the blur of the world passing by our window moves closer and closer to a burlap, will we forget what it means to stand still. Will we remember, before it is too late, the calculus of exponentials?

I just hope that we come to realize there are limits to things, and that at the end of the next century, Gleick's descendant in spirit isn't prompted to write a book entitled "He told you so."

Yes, I also checked if the DOOR CLOSE button was the most worn-off button in the lift I take to the office in the morning. It was. Shanghai has joined the rest of the hurried world after all.

In "Faster" James Gleick gives us a catalogue of the most visible symptoms of the "acceleration of just about everything" and of our reaction to this phenomenon. His conclusion is that our (Western) society and age suffer from what he calls "hurry sickness", and generally idolize Type A personalities: pushy, competitive, impatient people. Nothing new here, but some nice examples. "Faster" is a quick read. 36 chapters on about 280 pages. Tasty fast-food snacks? Yes, but also too many bites of information to digest at once. Gleick's scope is wide. He is talking about "just about everything" getting faster. I was dazzled - but also distracted, even bored at times.

In the first and the last chapter Gleick touches on the question of how people experience time. This is where things got interesting for me, and where Gleick gave a nice example why it appears as if time moves faster the older people become.

If you do not believe that we live in an accelerated world, try some very original and witty deceleration: Push the SLOW MOTION button and read Nicholson Baker's "The Mezzanine" or "The Fermata" by the same author. Try "The Mezzanine" first - you might get the wrong impression about Baker's qualities as a writer from the latter work (I have not really decided yet whether "The Fermata" is pornography, or not...).

If you can carve out a few hours from your busy schedule and read this book, you'll find it time well spent. And you'll also find yourself thinking much more pointedly about your time. "Faster" is really about time, about its importance and the pressures modern society places on our time. We live in what's called the Information Age where everything moves at the speed of light, and Gleick does an outstanding job of showing how the sheer speed of activity in our lives has changed us.

It's not a pretty picture. Think about all the time-saving devices that have come about in the last 25 years-- microwave, fax machine, copier, e-mail-- and then think about how much extra time these wonders have created. They haven't freed up time-- they've made it possible to fill time with more activity. Gleick's observations about how technology has accelerated the pace of life are spot-on and more than a little frightening. Everyone talks about shortening attention spans, yet today there is so much to attract our attention that it's hard to choose what to focus on. Too many books to read, too many shows to see, too many ways to spend our leisure time, which has not increased fast enough to match the demands on it. "Faster" does an excellent job of illustrating what a serious problem this is, a problem that doubtless will get worse before it gets better.

I read this book and loved it. I read it at a time in my life when I seemed to be always unable to keep up with all of the demands on my time and still take time to have a life. It is true that this book devolves by the end to a collection of stand-alone chapters that each explore a slightly different facet of the apparent quickening of pace in today's world. And there's a fair number of statistics and factoids, some of which you probably could have guessed by looking at the world around you. And it doesn't wrap up with a tidy conclusion that ties it all together. But it does explore the problem fairly thoroughly and I found that to be extremely worthwhile. It gave me a perspective on why I seemed always to be in a hurry and always late that I found very helpful and I think I have been better able to see and avoid the hidden things that eat all of my time. If you're always in a hurry and always late and don't know why, I highly recommend this book.

I liked the book, but ironically enough I found it a little slow. One of the problems was that Gleick seemed to have a particular bend, but struggled not to show it. Use of terms like "hurry sickness" belie the centrist view carried through the book. Many of the issues being covered are not historical, the ideas about cyberspace and the effect it will have on our society are largely speculative. With the important ramifications for society it would seem only natural to pick a solid stance but the author retains a dispassionate tone. The book was informative and a good introduction to a largely unstudied area: time "saving" devices and the changes that they make on our culture. The many interesting tidbits, insights, and humorous asides garnered a 4 star rating.