Faster: The Acceleration of Just about Everything

by James Gleick

Book Overview

From the bestselling, National Book Award-nominated author of Genius and Chaos, a bracing new work about the accelerating pace of change in today's world.

Most of us suffer some degree of hurry sickness. a malady that has launched us into the epoch of the nanosecond, a need-everything-yesterday sphere dominated by cell phones, computers, faxes, and remote controls. Yet for all the hours, minutes, and even seconds being saved,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 067977548X
• ISBN13: 9780679775485
• Release Date: January 2000
• Publisher: Vintage
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.2" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

Twenty-first century life in the fast lane!

James Gleick, author of the bestseller "Chaos" has created another compelling and often disturbing tale of the nature of our society. "Faster" characterizes our modern day thinking as overwhelmingly occupied with notions of time - time management, saving time, using time, keeping time, multi-tasking, channel surfing, high speed internet, moving sidewalks, high speed elevators, telephone speed dial functions, and, of course, the plethora of self-help books touting improvements in personal efficiency and productivity. A few pithy trenchant quotations from the book will illustrate Gleick's brilliant observation of the twenty-first century's morbid pre-occupation with time, speed and the generally unhealthy acceleration of life: "A medication is marketed `for women who don't have time for a yeast infection' - as though slackers might have time for that." "There are ... places and objects that signify impatience. Doctors' anterooms. The DOOR CLOSE button in elevators, so often a placebo, with no function but to distract for a moment those riders to whom ten seconds seem an eternity." "Marketers and technologists anticipate your desires with fast ovens, quick playback, quick freezing and fast credit. We bank the extra minutes that flow from these innovations, yet we feel impoverished and we cut back - on breakfast, on lunch, on sleep, on daydreams." "It might seem that to save time means to preserve it, spare it, free it from some activity that might otherwise have consumed it in the hot flames of busy-ness. Yet time-saving books are constantly admonishing people to do things." And yet, paradoxically, this notion of filling every millisecond of every day with productive activity is juxtaposed with the rather strange realization that: "Our idea of boredom - ennui, tedium, monotony, lassitude, mental doldrums - has been a modern invention. The word `boredom' barely existed even a century ago." Boredom - as silence, as emptiness, as time unfilled - was a mental state all but inconceivable a hundred years ago. But perversely, with all of the activities available at our fingertips and the ability to access those activities in seconds, we find ourselves thirsting for more and more. I wonder what Gleick would think of the fact that there were times when I found his book so interesting that I was skimming ... just so I could absorb it more quickly. (Note to self: the next time I listen to a piece of classical music, I'm going to do nothing else. I'm going to listen to the music for its own sake). Highly recommended. Paul Weiss

I could hardly wait to read this book

There's only one bad thing about James Gleick's Faster.. reading it you are constantly aware that you really do live at a much faster rate than you used too. As always, a detailed look at life from a different perspective. Enjoyed learning about the effects and reasons we feel that things are speeding up.

Hurry up and read this book!

"Faster" is a book about the modern culture of speeding up to save milliseconds. James Gleick finds so many interesting aspects of this "age of acceleration" that we are now living in... further, he wastes no time in describing the many facets of this new lifestyle and the possible ramifications of what he calls "hurry sickness".Why are we in such a rush?? Are we really saving time? And just what do we DO with those few seconds we seem to save by multitasking even the smallest of our daily activities?"Faster" answers many of those questions and it also looks into other scientific aspects of time and how we perceive it. I highly recommend this book for those who feel rushed in their lives but don't know why. I also recommend it for anyone interested in the science of time and time travel. James Gleick is a genius. He has an incredible way of provoking the reader to look closer into something and see what is really happening there. Hurry up and read this book, you'll be amazed at what you'll learn.

Maybe we all "know it" but will we change anything?

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."

magnificent achievement

The finest, most thought-provoking, funniest, saddest exploration of time, of technology, of our end-of-millennium condition, I've ever read. Not a science book at all, it turns out, though there's an amazing digression about numbers. You get near the end, and you're wondering how this cornucopia of ideas fits together, and you come to the astounding final sections, and you realize that this is a symphony, and you're finally beginning to understand our crazy lives in this interesting world of ours.