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Written by 
- Format: Trade Paperback, 352 pages
- Publisher: Vintage
- On Sale: September 5, 2000
- Price: $14.00
- ISBN: 978-0-679-77548-5 (0-679-77548-X)
about this book
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.
In Faster, 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.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.
