Time: Big Ideas, Small Books [Deckle Edge] [Paperback]

Eva Hoffman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 27, 2009 | Series: Big Ideas/Small Books

Novelist, cultural commentator, memoirist, and historian Eva Hoffman examines our ever-changing perception of time in this inspired addition to the BIG IDEAS/small books series

Time has always been the great given, the element that establishes the governing facts of human fate that cannot be circumvented, deconstructed, or wished away. But these days we are tampering with time in ways that affect how we live, the textures of our experience, and our very sense of what it is to be human. What is the nature of time in our time? Why is it that even as we live longer than ever before, we feel that we have ever less of this basic good? What effects do the hyperfast technologies--computers, video games, instant communications--have on our inner lives and even our bodies? And as we examine biology and mind on evermore microscopic levels, what are we learning about the process and parameters of human time? Hoffman regards our relationship to time--from jet lag to aging, sleep to cryogenic freezing--in this broad, eye-opening meditation on life’s essential medium and its contemporary challenges.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Time may be life's implacable constant, but it has undergone drastic and troubling revision in the modern age, argues this penetrating essay. Novelist and historian Hoffman (Lost in Translation) analyzes the simultaneous surfeit and famine of time that faces contemporary society. Our lives, she argues, have grown longer, but we cram ever more work and activity into each multitasking moment. Meanwhile, she contends, technology has chopped up the flow of time into a succession of disjointed nanoseconds, while banishing the natural rhythms of diurnal and seasonal time and depositing us in a frenetic 24/7. Hoffman places the derangement of time at the root of many of modernity's discontents: it underlies the ethos of conspicuous exertion that tyrannizes our work lives, she writes, and perhaps induces our growing epidemic of attention deficit disorder, whose symptoms mimic the pattern of contemporary digital time. Hoffman's exploration ranges lucidly across neuroscience, psychoanalysis and modernist literature to plumb time's mysteries. Her approach is smart and informed, but also pensive and a bit melancholy, wary of what's lost in trying to manage and optimize time; even time's ravages of decay and death, she warns, are inextricably tied up with the meaning of life. (Nov.)
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Review

"Eva Hoffman is as accomplished a memoirist and critic as virtually any contemporary American writer. . . . Her criticism and reviewing are characterized by a crystalline prose style and intimacy of thought, and they range over an astonishing spectrum."--The New York Times Book Review

"It is one of those books. . . that hits a newly discovered nerve and takes a few steps further towards civilizing the planet."--The Guardian on Lost in Translation

"A daring and generous book, measured in style, passionate in intent."--The Nation on Shtetl

"Hoffman examines this philosophically fraught subject in unpretentious, clear chapters: asking how time affects our bodies, our minds, our cultures, and, finally, how time has accelerated and changed with the advent of the concept of "immediacy"—or, as she puts it, "what pace and density of stimulus we need in order to feel that something 'interesting' is happening."—Benjamin Moser, Harper's

"Best known as a novelist and memoirist (Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language), Hoffman deftly tackles this complex topic in a highly readable and entertaining way… This is a book for readers interested in exploring the world around them or hoping to see their surroundings in a new light.  A fascinating and easy-to-read meditation on a deceptively simple concept."—Library Journal

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Picador; First Edition edition (October 27, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312427271
• ISBN-13: 978-0312427276
• Product Dimensions: 7.1 x 4.6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #906,964 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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20 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A waste of time, August 27, 2009

By 

Anonymous (USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Time: Big Ideas, Small Books (Paperback)

(What's this?)

I had high hopes for this book, as a new entry in the generally terrific new series "Big Ideas, Small Books." (If the name of the series seems a bit self-congratulatory, it's easy to forgive that in exchange for their compulsively readable and clever pairings of authors and subjects: titles like Slavoj Zizek on violence or Jenny Diski on the Sixties should be on anyone's list of the best recent mass-market titles for intellectuals.)

But this is simply an awful book; it's a disorganized mass of superficial fluff that would be more at home as a bunch of trend pieces in TIME magazine than as a serious discussion of the nature and experience of time. It never coheres around any particular topic ("time" itself being so broad as to permit the book to cover anything at all), nor does it develop any single idea beyond the most vacuous level of ostensible insights about contemporary life. The book opens with an interesting, if already self-indulgent, memoirish introduction; this seems to set us up for a reflection on Hoffman's experiences in communist Eastern Europe and later in the US, but no such continuous story follows. If it were not immediately dropped, Hoffman's lapse into this (perhaps somewhat tired) genre of emigre reminiscence would at least promise a thread of personal narrative to connect -- this is how Dubravka Ugresic's brilliant philosophical fiction The Museum of Unconditional Surrender works (and to be clear, anyone who hasn't read it should head straight to that book, and skip this one entirely).

But instead of a memoir, Hoffman gives us a series of meandering, superficial chapters on vapid, overbroad topics like "Time and the Body," "Time and Culture," or "Time in Our Time." Rather than a thoughtful essay, each of these chapters is a collection of seemingly arbitrarily connected paragraphs, each citing (and often badly mangling) some set of factoids, and lamely parlaying each one into an attempted Deep Insight, before lurching to the next factoid in turn. Most of these paragraphs could have come straight from hackneyed trend articles in Newsweek or Wired ("Is Twitter Making Us Unable to Concentrate?", that kind of thing), except that this would've implied better fact-checking -- the book is studded with gems such as Hoffman's po-faced paragraph on circadian rhythms, which informs us that a day is the time taken by the Earth to revolve around the Sun! In such a context readers will not, perhaps, be surprised that Hoffman proceeds to make a hash of Stephen Hawking and the anthropic principle, nor of Merleau-Ponty, nor of neuroscience, nor of the way computers work and the Internet's effect on society -- but, like some parodic cocktail-party "polymath," so she does, making claims about all these things based, apparently, on expertise conferred by half-remembered sound bites.

The general drift of the book, anyhow, is that Our Modern Condition -- a condition that "we" seem to know about from news clippings about technology, science, and culture, and from our personal store of anecdotal trivia -- is Changing Our Relation to Time. But the details that would make any such claim interesting, worthy of debate or further thought, are never really filled in. Luckily the book is quite short, but even in the space allotted Hoffman somehow still manages the trick of seeming like a tiresome, shallow blowhard. A short book on some aspect of temporality written from a truly thoughtful philosophical, historical, social-theoretic, or even neurological-psychological perspective would have been a treat in this series. But readers who'd have wanted that should really look elsewhere to broaden their views of time and experience -- at books like Michael Löwy's new take on Walter Benjamin's famous "On the Concept of History", Istvan Meszaros on historical time, or, as mentioned above, Ugresic's philosophical novel on the exile's boredom.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars It's About Time, September 13, 2009

By 

J. W. Kennedy "in statu uiae et meriti" (Richmond, VA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Time: Big Ideas, Small Books (Paperback)

(What's this?)

Not particularly profound or fascinating; just mildly interesting and thought-provoking. This is a long essay or short book about the subject of time. What is time? What is humanity's relationship with time? Chapter 1 deals with aging and death; the concept of mortality and the human ability to know that our time is limited are part of the very essence of being human. It is precisely because we know that our lives will end that gives them meaning to us. Chapter 2 discusses time and its relationship to the psyche. The way we experience time in terms of memory and perception has profound effects on our psychological state, and vice versa. This chapter was hard to understand in spots. Chapter 3 is very short. It mentions briefly the cultural differences between different societies and how they manage time. We jump straight into chapter 4, which is all about the acceleration of time and the disjunction of experience endemic to modern life. As people do more work and process more information at a faster pace, there is no pause to internalize experience, and as a result people become psychologically isolated, with no sense of collective experience, no past, and no future.

Favorite ideas from the book: Modern life has substituted speed for significance. Time is both the condition and the medium for human meaning. Taking time to pause, slow down, and internalize experience is more important than ever in the post-modern age.

There are thorough notes, a bibliography, and an index in the back. Might be useful to somebody...

This book is short and interesting, but it seems to have a limited appeal. It's not engaging enough for the average recreational reader, and it isn't deep enough for the serious intellectual or philosopher. It's just okay. There's not a thing wrong with the writing, but I don't know who I could recommend it to.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars disappointing, bit jumbled and vague, not all that original, October 3, 2009

By 

B. Capossere (Rochester, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Time: Big Ideas, Small Books (Paperback)

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Time was a disappointing book in several ways. Organizationally, it never felt sharply focused, whether within chapters or as an entire work. It also often felt, for lack of a better word, "mushy"--lacking precision and a sense of the concrete; I rarely felt fully grounded in its discussion. There was too much from the Freudian point of view from my liking, too much from psychology--the sort of soft science where statements are made with a confidence that readers, or at least this reader, feel is unwarranted or where sweeping generalizations are made that seem a bit flimsy. The sections on time and modern life jump around quite a bit, leading into topics then jumping out of them. I realize this is meant to be a short overview but I would have preferred to spend a bit more time to explore more in depth, especially as what we're left with our a lot of observations on modern life that either aren't all that startling (i.e. ones we've come up with ourselves) or that we've seen in many mass media discussions, let alone handled better and more fully in specific works by authors such as Gleick.

It was a push to finish the book and by the end I didn't feel I'd gained all that much in doing so. It lacks the precision and depth of other books on the topic (or the book's subtopics) so I wouldn't recommend it to those looking for that. And yet, while short, its lack of focus and lyricism doesn't really lend itself to those looking for a sort of essayistic approach to the topic. In short, it feels stuck in the mushy middle, which is why I can't really recommend it.