Rating: 
Summary: Not Gleick's best
Review: This seems like the perfect topic for the times. The cover is catchy, the writer excels at making seemingly abstract topics topical (Chaos is superb) and he's gives great NPR. The first chapter or two, which I read before buying the book, was mesmerizing. That made my disappointment with Faster all the greater.Gleick writes a series of great short newspaper-length stories, binds them together and calls it a book. To be sure, there is a bevy of fascinating factoids here. But Gleick never really creates a thesis and never really advances any particular argument. Some of the scenes he paints are memorable, but nothing really holds them together as a book. I tried to overcome that by reading a chapter a day on the subway and not even that worked. It's almost like he's trying to write a "fast" book that the reader can zip through. Well, in that area he succeeds, but in so doing he fails to move the book in any particular direction. Gleick is a well-known writer with a good track record. I'm sure sales of this book have been good. But I hope that doesn't stop someone else from tackling a similar subject.
Rating: 
Summary: Highly Recommended!
Review: Our lives have speeded up, a phenomena that affects both individuals and society according to author James Gleick. He describes examples of speed's impact in chapters that read like separate essays on different aspects of life. He covers the acceleration in machines, in books, in advertising, in attention span and so on. Ironically, his book is written in a very leisurely, reflective, pop-sociology or pop-history style that takes its time in exploring different historical developments leading to the speed up of life today. This is an observation, not a criticism, since we at getAbstract.com find that his book provides an engaging, compelling look at these changes in society. While many of these changes - such as the explosion of new technologies over the last ten years - will seem very familiar, Gleick's broad view of these developments offers executives, managers and general readers a new context for understanding them, if you can slow down long enough to read it.
Rating:
Summary: You have to make time to read this.
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: A Breathlessly Superficial Collection of Tidbits
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Hurry up and read this book!
Review: "Faster" is a book about the modern culture of speeding up to save milliseconds. James Gleick finds so many interesting aspects of this "age of acceleration" that we are now living in... further, he wastes no time in describing the many facets of this new lifestyle and the possible ramifications of what he calls "hurry sickness". Why are we in such a rush?? Are we really saving time? And just what do we DO with those few seconds we seem to save by multitasking even the smallest of our daily activities? "Faster" answers many of those questions and it also looks into other scientific aspects of time and how we perceive it. I highly recommend this book for those who feel rushed in their lives but don't know why. I also recommend it for anyone interested in the science of time and time travel. James Gleick is a genius. He has an incredible way of provoking the reader to look closer into something and see what is really happening there. Hurry up and read this book, you'll be amazed at what you'll learn.
Rating: 
Summary: Breezy. Fast. And bright yellow.
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Mind candy
Review: I listened to it on the way to work so I could do two things at once. How ironic... This is a good book to kill time, you may even laugh at yourself as you discover your own habits revealed and explained before your very eyes. I did The elevator door close button and the double button microwave cooking methods to save time tid bits are very funny!! As well as the "500 calories a day you starve 3000 a day you are as fat as a pig"
Rating: 
Summary: GLCK ADDCT
Review: 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!
Rating:
Summary: gleick has learned to write
Review: 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
Rating:
Summary: Matter Moves Faster Inward
Review: 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.
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