Faster: Our Race Against Time

Time is the datum that rules our lives. The frenetic purpose - more than we want to admit - is to save time. Think of one of those conveniences that best conveys the most elemental feeling of power over the passing seconds: the microwave oven. In your "hurry sickness" you may find yourself punching 88 seconds instead of 90 because it is faster to tap the same digit twice. Do you stand at the microwave for that minute and a half? Or is that long enough to make a quick call or run in the next room to finish paying a bill? If haste is the gas pedal for the pace of our lives, then multi-tasking is overdrive. This work dissects our unceasing daily struggle to squeeze as much as we can - but never enough - into the 1440 minutes of each day. Speed is the key strategy for saving time, and James Gleick shows us how in just about every area - from business cycle time to beeper medicine, from Federal Express to quick playback buttons on answering machines, from the pace of television to our growing need to do two things at once, speed has become the experience we all have in common - it, more than the message, is what connects us.

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5 CDs / approx. 5 hours

We are always trying to save it. We fit more and more into less and less of it. But no matter what we do, there is never enough of it. With acute insight and mordant wit, James Gleick examines the biological, psychological, and cultural considerations that define our very human limits where time is concerned. He begins with "technological" time: the development of the watch; the advent of standard time; the jolt of recognition brought about by machines in which speed could be measured, computed, or adjusted; photography's ability to freeze a fast-moving world; computer-generated time. He then explores the myriad ways--from business-cycle time to beeper medicine to Federal Express to quick playback buttons on answering machines--in which we employ speed in an attempt to streach the mere 1,440 minutes alloted to us each day.

Faster is a fascinating, eye-opening portrait of our life and times--and the time in out lives--as we prepare for the final sprint toward the millennium.