Customer Reviews (2)

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

Move over John A. McPhee, coming through
The master of important trivia, John A. McPhee "Oranges" ISBN: 0374226881, is about to be surpassed by James Gleick, "The Acceleration Guy." The history of chronometry will never be the same.His insights on elevators are uplifting. He discuses the type-A personality and its misconceptions. I will not go through every subject as you do not have TIME to read this review, but I was surprised to find out what "God's speed" meant.

Faster: Our Race Against Time
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Word count: 2350. ... Read more

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The role of chaos in science and mathematics is examined in detail by the essays that comprise this work. Distinguished scholars specializing in mathematics, physics, and chemistry discuss the following subjects: Fractals, by Benoit Mandelbrot; The Causality Principle, Deterministic Laws and Chaos, by Heinz-Otto Peitgen; The Transition to Chaos, by Mitchell Feigenbaum; Time, Dynamics and Chaos: Integrating Poincare's "Non-Integrable Systems", by Ilya Prigogine; What Is Chaos, by Steve Smale; Chaos and Cosmos: A Theological Approach, by John Polkinghorne; and Chaos and Beyond, by James Gleick. Introduction by John Holte. This volume is number 26 in the Nobel Conference Series. Co-published with the Nobel Conference. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A taste
Like the coverage of any conference, you really had to be there.So this, as one might expect, gives a good taste of what the field is about.I had to know more, and the recomended reading and the references abound to let me do just that.Enjoy.

excellent description of system mathematics
easily read in layman's terms to understand the basic principles of chaos mathematics. ... Read more

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As one of our leading science writers, James Gleick has always been ahead of the curve. He chronicled the genius of the great physicist Richard Feynman, and explained chaos theory in a way all of us could understand. Now, in a collection of previously published pieces, he muses on the Internet revolution that has taken place all around us. From the foibles and ambitions of Microsoft, which he predicted would come to take over the world years before it became obvious to the rest of us, to the futuristic possibilities of mobile networked computing, Gleick gives us a gradual and inexorable account of the way computers have come to pervade our lives. ... Read more