Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything (Hardcover) | Released: 17 Aug 1999

Synchronize your watches.We have reached the epoch of the nanosecond. This is the heyday of speed.If one quality defines our modern, technocratic age, it is acceleration. We are making haste. Our computers, our movies, our sex lives, our prayers -- they all run faster now than ever before. And the more we fill our lives with time-saving devices and time-saving strategies, the more rushed we feel.InFaster, James Gleick explores nothing less than the human condition at the turn of the millennium. He shines a light of enterprising and analytical reporting -- as well as sly wit -- on the newest paradoxes of time. His journey takes us through the bunkers and trenches of a war we barely knew we were fighting: to the atomic clocks of the Directorate of Time, to the waiting rooms that focus our impatience, to the film production studios that test the high-speed limits of our perception, to the air-traffic command centers that give time pressure new meaning.We have become a quick-reflexed, multitasking, channel-flipping, fast-forwarding species. We don't completely understand it, and we're not altogether happy about it.Faster is a mirror held up to our times -- and a mordant reminder of why some things take time.Bookswagon.com Review Never in the history of the human race have so many had so much to do in so little time. That, anyway, is the impression most of us have of civilized life at the end of the millennium, andFaster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything only sharpens it. Elegantly composed and insightfully researched,Faster delivers a brisk volley of observations on how microchips, media, and economics, among other things, have accelerated the pace of everyday experience over the course of the manic 20th century. Author of the pop-science triumph, Chaos, James Gleick brings his formidable writing skills to bear here, creating an almost poetic flow of ideas from what in other hands might have been just a mass of interesting facts and anecdotes. Whether tracing the modern history of chronometry (from Louis-François Cartier's invention of the wristwatch to the staggeringly precise atomic clocks of today's standards bureaus) or revealing the ways the camera has sped up our subjective sense of pace (from the freeze frames of Eadweard Muybridge's early photographic experiments to the jump cuts of MTV's latest videos), Gleick manages to weave in slyly perceptive or occasionally profound points about our increasingly hopped-up relationship to time. The result is the kind of thing only an accelerated culture like ours could have come up with: an instant classic. --Julian Dibbell Review Praise for James Gleick:Chaos"Chaos is not only enthralling and precise, but full of beautifully strange and strangely beautiful ideas."-- Douglas Hofstadter"There is a teleological grandeur about this new math that gives the imagination wings."--Vogue"Gleick has a novelist's touch for describing his scientists and their settings, an eye for the apt analogy, and a sense of the dramatic and the poetic."--The San Francisco ChronicleGenius"The clearest statement I have seen of the true spirit of science. Although I am a long-time friend and admirer of Feynman, I feel that I know him better after reading this book than I did before."-- Freeman Dyson"A rare jewel-like biography. I can't remember a book in which, confronted with a personality so complex and a subject so difficult, I felt, as a reader, so secure."-- Robert Kanigel,The Washington Post From the Publisher A conversation with James Gleick, author of Faster: The Acceleration of Just About EverythingQ: You actually met the Director of the Directorate of Time. What is his job exactly, and was it as surreal as it sounds?A: I hope I didn't make Dr. Winkler sound too surreal. He's recently retired. He was head honcho of the official U.S. government bureau that keeps track of the time. They say what time it