Customer Reviews

Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Jam-packed with information and covering subjects that range from Richard Feynman's observations of theoretical physics to the rise of MTV, this book reads, well, fastly. I got a kick out of it and learned a lot. It has a very large number of chapters which are not always that closely tied together, but maybe an obvious point is that that is the intent of the author, to make the book read like modern Western society, with information flying at you from all directions. If so, that may make the book a little harder to get in to and less conventional in style, but it also makes it more original, and in a sense, more logical because it is consistent with its own theme. Author of Adjust Your Brain: A Practical Theory for Maximizing Mental Health.

Aha! We knew it all along! Life, work, off-time - 'things' - just seem a hell of a lot faster these days. Those of us with typical 21st century urban, technology led lifestyles are all too familiar with the constant background noise of accelerated living. In Faster, Gleick amasses a mixed bag of armchair philosophy, anecdotal antics and random research to document our strangely mercurial existence.

And a mixed bag it is indeed. The book shines best when Gleick exposes in detail those 'hidden' time-saving procedures that underpin our everyday lives. The passage on telephone directory enquiries, where we discover the drive to shave mere milliseconds from customer's inbound requests, is a real eye-opener. As is the revelation that time-saving procedures have even encroached on the age old traditions of the leisurely 9-inning baseball game. And who would have thought that a restaurant in Tokyo now offers an all-you-can-eat service charging customers by the minute? Dining by time-clock? Well, thanks, but no thanks.

Still, I would have liked to have seen these sketches gather momentum and lead to a more cogent line of thought. Instead, they simply drift away and what remains is an assortment of charming but ultimately unsubstantial tales. Nothing more, nothing less. Readers looking for a more protracted cultural analysis, a deeper probe into psychological aetiology, or a broader review of our collective existential malaise will likely be disappointed.

So, It's hardly a radical premise. And there's no real conclusion to speak of; no pulling together of the various threads that weave through this work. But as a collection of interesting hors d'oeuvres and after-dinner anecdotes, this is an entertaining enough read which - thankfully - requires a not considerable investment of time nor energy. Bloody good job too, as I had to cook supper and pay my gas bill online at the same time.

How can we fit all the things we need to do into the 24 hours of each day and still leave time for the things we want to do, and have to do? The truth is we just can't and James Gleick dissects our typical day in a humorous and informative way to demonstrate how we can't possibly have time to read his book. This is much, much more approachable than 'Chaos' and you should 'make time' to give this your full attention and read it from cover to cover.

I had a similar experience with Gleicks' previous book 'Chaos': I had trouble putting it down and ended up reading the entire book in 2 days...in 'Faster' he has clearly mastered the style of writing loosely refered to as 'pop-science' ...while this 'anecdote mixed with fact' style has been imitated in many other books of this sort Gleick manages to grab the reader by both lapels and doesn't let go until they turn the last page...while the content of 'Faster' is less engaging than 'Chaos' his style keeps you turning pages...it is the perfect book for a transatlantic flight!

lucid prose. fascinating ideas.

My favorite anecdote from the book -- in Japan, the paint on the close door button in elevators is often worn off. Elevators themselves make one of the more interesting sections of the book. The problem with faster elevators is not so much being able to move the elevator that fast, but other things -- making sure that the slight vibrations don't cause it to hit the side of the shaft, figuring out some way to stop people's ears from popping.

Each chapter offers a new insight or set of insights. I think it is near impossible to be bored reading this book

After his bestseller CHAOS James Gleick takes us FASTER on the right track again to the frontiers of modern knowledge. He shows that everything accelerates implying current misunderstanding of time. It seems that matter moves faster inward and that knowledge brings its parts closer so accelerating everything. We build trains, airplanes, rockets, Internet, etc. and somehow everything goes faster. For insights in this mysterious universal acceleration you may buy also Eugene Savov's Theory of Interaction the Simplest Explanation of Everything - showing that matter moves faster inward in a 3D-spiral way and so it becomes denser inward, dense enough to curve, reflect, create and emit or engulf light. You will be most surprised to find out where this universal acceleration leads us.

I've read this book several times over the last year or two. I enjoy it every time. There are many interesting anecdotes about how life has accelerated almost beyond control. Curiously enough, the book itself goes at a slow pace. There is a refreshing difference between the relaxed pace of the book and the frantic pace of the subject matter. Reading it straight through might not be the best way to approach this book. I enjoy reading one chapter at a time at night as a way to relax from my own fast-paced life.

Gleick's slim little book about the quickening pace of...well, everything...turned out to be surprisingly tedious. The book's main drawback is that it's nothing more than a collection of loosely related anecdotes: how airline scheduleing software optimizes plane routes, how call switching programs handle zillions of calls, how movies are compressed into MTV-like bursts, how modern audiences can't sit still for a full symphony, etc. (If lists like this actually interest you, you might like "Faster".) While there are plenty of discreet observations of quick "stuff", there's almost no analysis to speak of, no discussion of the implications of this increasing quickness or speculation on where it might ultimitely lead.

The writing style is largely glib and ironic, offering the reader little substance to chew on. A prime example of the irony of this book is the fact that many of the chapters are only three pages long.

Read the first chapter today over breakfast ;-) Loved it, esp. the way it ends: Sophocles said Time was a gentle deity, but, nowadays, it cracks the whip.

Was quite intrigued by the cover of the hardcover edition. You can guess the words; but, without the vowels, they look as if they have lost their soul.

Plan to read the rest of the book when in a traffic jam, which someone has described as the preserve of the motorist (pun intended).

After hearing so many people rave above Gleick's two previous books, "Chaos" and "Genius", I was very much taken aback by this unstructured collage of factoids and tidbits. Written in a whiny and grating first-person address to the reader, the book regurgitates endless anecdotal and semi-documented examples of how modern life has accelerated the pace of everyday life. It's somewhat bizarre (or perhaps nudge-nudge, wink-wink, ironic) that the book is divided into wee snippets of psuedo-chapters, reflecting/acknowledging?, the national decline in attention span. While some of these individual items are certainly interesting in their own merit-I liked the discussion of the original research into "Type A" personalities, the bit on telephone voice acceleration technology, and the brief economics of time part near the end-the overall effect is like reading a scrapbook of magazine sidebars and mini-features with no framework other than the self-evident notion that in the industrialized West, we live at a "faster" pace than any previous generation. Nowhere is there any discussion of how we might, as a society, turn away from this trend, or even if we should. (Gleick implicitly characterizes this trend as a negative one throughout). A breathlessly superficial survey which offers no analysis or insight.