Customer Reviews

Time: Big Ideas, Small Books

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

"Time" is an interdisciplinary, contemplative and often rambling look at the concept of that subject by author Eva Hoffman. Hoffman conceptually slices her discussions of time into four broad categories:
-body
-mind
-culture
-"time in our time".

These dissections of time incorporate about as many "-ologies" as you can imagine: anthropology, sociology, biology, neurology and physiology; and that's just for starters. Add some straight up physics, some classic Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford-inspired scientific management and frequent doses of literary treatments of time, (Shakespeare, Swift, de Bovier, Nabokov) garnish with some popular culture context (The Rolling Stones), and you are left with an interdisciplinary tour de force...if your measure is the frequency and quantity of references.

Regretably, outside of the four categorical divisions, the book lacks focus. Within each section, the prose meanders from question to question, often without meaningful segues. Hoffman drops so many names and disciplines into the mix that sometimes it seems like she's just trying to prove her erudition.

Hoffman's prose can be described in a single word: dense. The sentences are long, the paragraphs are longer (some entire pages contain only part of one paragraph), and the word selection is sometimes painful. The concepts are complicated enough, but the reader is then asked to overlay those on writing that includes words like "deterritorialism" and "paradigmatic".

Even if we accept that complex topics demand complex writing, there are statements in this book so fundamentally flawed that they erode confidence in other conclusions. Hoffman claims: "Amphetamines or cocaine [are] used routinely by whole rafts of high flying professionals..." and "...these days the young turn to Ecstasy and other pill cocktails, while cocaine is the substance of choice for the upwardly mobile...likely to be taken to boost performance in the hyperspeeded sectors of the financial professions..." I've worked with "professionals" in the private and public sectors. While I don't doubt I've worked with some who used both cocaine and amphetamines, I would not be easily convinced that their use was either "routine" or "widespread". Unsubstantiated assertions don't help Hoffman's cause.

In the end, the broad range of art and science in the discussion don't offer adequate illumination of a bottom line in her findings. Sleep patterns --especially abbreviated ones common to the developed world-- are addressed at length. If you're having trouble getting to sleep...this book might just help.

Here's a typical sentence from "Time": "The Greeks acknowledged a sort of ontological heterochrony by naming two kinds of time: Chronos, the time of continuity and mutability, and Kairos, the temporality of the auspicious moments of opportunity or crisis--the kind of heightened and irretrievable instant that we need to grab by the horns, or the head."

I'll admit that that's not a bad sentence--not so punchy, but the whole thing makes enough sense and has the portentous high style of a writer who's out to impress. Now imagine, however, that an entire book were stitched out of such sentences, one after another, sometimes with logical connectives scattered in-between, sometimes not...and then you'll have a pretty good idea of what the experience of reading "Time" is like.

It seems a little mean-spirited to condemn this book--I have no doubt that Ms. Hoffmann, given the number of classy books she's read, is probably a splendid dinnertime conversationalist--but one, when picking up a book with a subtitle that promises to offer BIG IDEAS, expects that the author will take it upon herself to have at least some quixotic or heterodox notions on the chosen subjects at hand.

And that's just the problem. This volume feel's like a grad student's literature search, a detailed annotated bibliography that has required quite extensive work in the archives, but the writer hasn't gone so far as to put her own stamp on the material. So if you'd like to find out a superficial list of other books that deal with time--a guide for your own further reading--then this little book's probably not a bad place to start. But if you're looking for a fresh vision on any time-related subject, keep looking.

(P.S. I picked up this book hoping that it would discuss some of the philosophical/scientific ideas of time, and it doesn't. This isn't a criticism (the goal of the piece is to offer a humanist's POV), but I simply add this to help you decide whether or not this is what you're looking for. Of the book's four chapters--Time: 1. and the Body, 2. and the Mind, 3. and Culture, & 4. in Our Time--only the first goes into any scientific studies, and in that case it's only in terms of biology. An interesting book that investigates time from a physics perspective is About Time: Einstein's Unfinished Revolution by Paul Davies, and a collection of super historical sources on the subject of time is the (more technical) book Problems of Space and Time.)

Hoffman is clearly an intelligent writer with a knack for perceptive and critical analysis; her abilities manage to shine through despite a generally muddled and disorganized foray into examining time (as a subject in this book). Her objective in this svelte volume is to peer into our modern conception of Time, and to (presumably) open the doors for philosophical discussion. As a starting point, she is relatively good at her job: "Time" winds up being eminently read-able and accessible. It forges many pathways to further exploration and research, without being overwhelming in its informational content.

However, by the very nature of the subject, Hoffman is likely also dealing with an impossibly-complex subject; let alone in a very small book. Even in the best-case scenario, the subject matter is simply too vast to consider in such a small volume; Hoffman valiantly attempts to do too much in too small a space. She would have been best off simply choosing one or two conceptual discussions and leaving well enough alone.

This book consists of four very personal essays on (1) Time and the Body, (2) Time and the Mind, (3) Time and Culture, and (4) Time in Our Time. In each essay, the author reflects widely on aspects of human experience that are rather loosely related to "time", such as (1) the modern woman's concern with her ticking "biological clock", (2) individual variation in "temporal awareness" that causes some people to be perpetually aware of time, while others appear to be oblivious to time, (3) the way that the flow of time is sensed, regulated, and perceived in different world cultures, and (4) the recent diagnosing of ADD (attention deficit disorder) in children who seem to experience severe splintering of time and attention due to insufficient dopamine production.

All of these topics are intriguing, but the author does not discuss or treat any topic in depth. Instead, for each time-related curiosity, phenomenon, new discovery, or recent development, she is content to note its existence, to offer her brief reflections and thoughts on it, and then to move on to the next topic. Thus, the book does not offer the scientific, analytic approach to a discussion of "time" that I was expecting. There are, for example, no charts or graphs from sleep studies, time-motion studies, or other scientific studies. Perhaps my expectation was unrealistic, because the author is described on the book's jacket as a "novelist, cultural commentator, memoirist, and historian."

Definitely, the book is a personal memoir, a meditation on "time". It is a scholarly work, published by St. Martin's Press under license from Pan Books; and it is apparently part of a series of Picador Reading Group Guides. I can well imagine that the book might provide "food for thought" or function as a "discussion starter" for the right reading group. However, it is not light pleasure reading, unless you enjoy reading published essays, and you, like the author, "have always been preoccupied with time."

I was originally very excited about this book - it seemed like it would be an interesting treatise on the human relation to time, both on our day-to-day lives as well as deep time. After many a night waking up with this book laying on my chest after it put me to sleep, I finally had to give up on it's promise of a Big Idea in a Small Book.

In the end, this book is a disorganized meander through our hectic lives in a modern civilization that points out the obvious... we all need to slow down, sometimes do nothing more than breathe for a few moments, and declutter our lives literally and figuratively. Less stuff (and that includes virtual stuff like emails and video games) means more experience... and more experience means you have more time.

But, don't waste that time by reading this book.

>>>>>>><<<<<<<

A Guide to my Book Rating System:

1 star = The wood pulp would have been better utilized as toilet paper.
2 stars = Don't bother, clean your bathroom instead.
3 stars = Wasn't a waste of time, but it was time wasted.
4 stars = Good book, but not life altering.
5 stars = This book changed my world in at least some small way.

Many studies of time: physical, psychological, cultural and philosophical have been written in the last few years. Some of the best of these make testable predictions, refer to experimental evidence, or prescribe behavior whose effects can be observed. Even the best studies that refer to our personal psychological experience of time, like Benjamin Libet's "Mind Time" and "The Time Paradox" by Philip Zimbardo and John Boyd refer to specific testing of their hypotheses and describe reproducible behaviors whose results can be scientifically studied as well as abstractly experienced. In this well written essay on the personal, psychological and cultural experience of time Ms. Hoffman writes beautifully about her own opinions of how time is and could be experienced and processed in the modern era. While she does refer to a variety of psychological, and scientific studies as well as important literary sources such as Nabokov and Proust her reporting of observable scientific phenomena is anecdotal, personal and second-hand. Where as testable observations of even personally felt states such as meditation have been written by scientists like Andrew Newberg and James Austin, Ms. Hoffman reports "Aside from whatever seductions exoticism, esoteric religion or mantra yoga may offer, one can see the appeal of such concentration to the denizens of digital time."[pg 163] She also speculates, "it is possible that ADHD children emit less Dopamine because they feel anxious and internally disorganized, rather than the other way around" [pg 152]; without suggesting an experiment to test her intuition derived hypothesis.

Perhaps, the best summary of this personal essay on the experience of time is given in Ms. Hoffman's acknowledgements where she states, "My great thanks go to Lisa Appignanesi, for encouraging me to follow my thematic impulses," [pg 208]. Because Ms. Hoffman's essay is beautifully written and refers the reader to numerous scientific, philosophical and literary sources which can be studied on their own merit I consider this book to be worthy of note.

--Ira Laefsky

The author did a great job investigating so many aspects of time, and drawing me into an open state of introspection. I commend her for taking on such an elusive topic, and found her writing style to be well informed, articulate, and creative.