Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything by James Gleick (2000, Paperback)

Key Details
Author:	James Gleick
Language:	English
Publisher:	Vintage Books
Format:	Paperback
ISBN-10:	067977548X
ISBN-13:	9780679775485

Size
Length:	330 pages
Height:	8 in
Width:	5.3 in
Thickness:	0.8 in
Weight:	10.4 oz

Publisher's Note
From the bestselling, National Book Award-nominated auhtor 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, we're still filling our days to the point that we have no time for such basic human activities as eating, sex, and relating to our families. Written with fresh insight and thorough research, Faster is a wise and witty look at a harried world not likely to slow down anytime soon.

Presents a study of the human fascination with time from a psychological, biological, and cultural perspective, tracing the development of measuring time and exploring ways in which we try to stretch our allotted time.

The best-selling author of Chaos and Genius presents an intriguing study of the human fascination with time from a psychological, biological, and cultural perspective tracing the development of measuring time and exploring ways in which we try to stretch our allotted time. Reprint. 75,000 first printing.

Industry Reviews
"In FASTER [Gleick] trains a magnifying glass on our speed-driven world, illuminating the modern human's obsession with time and challenging a few myths about our relation to it....FASTER is filled with so many lively facts and anecdotes about time that it has an urgent tension. It almost makes reading seem like a waste of time....But Gleick manages to keep a hold on the reader, even if he occasionally treads dangerously close to list-making where narrative and analysis would work better."
San Francisco Chronicle - Kathryn Phillips (10/10/1999)

"In his engaging but breathless new book, Gleick...has compiled many hundreds of facts, demonstrating conclusively...that for some number of Americans and others, life gets faster with every passing moment, gets busier, more cluttered with channels that bring us what we fancy to be information....In his breakneck rundown, Gleick doesn't pause often to ask difficult questions....He is--yes!--in too much of a hurry."
Los Angeles Times - Todd Gitlin (09/12/1999)

"We have been hearing laments about the "accelerating pace of life" from cultural critics for decades. What makes Mr. Gleick's [FASTER] worth reading is the detail he brings to it. Some of this detail, admittedly, is a little familiar....Happily, though, Mr. Gleick brings to our attention plenty of less familiar--and often diabolically clever--techniques now being used to salvage a millisecond here and a millisecond there."
Wall Street Journal - Jim Holt (08/25/1999)

"FASTER is at its best when Gleick offers a glimpse of the mechanics behind that ever-accelerating clock....But when the argument widens out to address the larger implications of these time-saving devices, the book runs headlong into something we suspected about ourselves already: we're in a rush; we've got short attention spans; everything's moving faster than it did in the old days."
Feed - Steven Johnson (09/01/1999)

"Gleick, the author of "Chaos" and a biography of Richard Feynman, has stuffed his new book with tasty factoids about our fast, fast times....But we're not just talking sound bites here. "Faster" reverberates with huge, weighty questions, such as whether we're doomed to run up against a biological speed limit set by our sluggish old carbon-based bodies and brains."
New York Times Book Review - Barbara Ehrenreich (11/07/1999)

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