Timekeepers: How the World Became Obsessed with Time
Jan 2020 · Canongate Books
4.5star
2 reviewsreport
Ebook
369
Pages
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About this ebook
By the bestselling author of Just My Type: a "thoroughly enjoyable and illuminating" journey into the concept of time "stuffed with fascinating material" ( Observer, UK).
Timekeepers is a book about our obsession with time and our desire to measure it, control it, sell it, film it, perform it, immortalize it and make it meaningful. In this fascinating, anecdotal exploration, award-winning author Simon Garfield has two simple intentions: to tell some illuminating stories, and to ask whether we have all gone completely nuts.
Here, Garfield explores the nature of time through stories such as: the Beatles learning to be brilliant in an hour and a half; an Englishman arriving back from Calcutta, refusing to adjust his watch; Beethoven's symphonic wishes being ignored; a US Senator's speech that goes for 25 hours; the horrors of war frozen at the click of a camera; a woman who designs a ten-hour clock and reinvents the calendar; Roger Bannister living out the same four minutes over a lifetime; and a who prince attempts to stop time in its tracks.
"Digressive, gossipy, thoughtful and thoroughly entertaining."— The Sunday Times, UK
Timekeepers is a book about our obsession with time and our desire to measure it, control it, sell it, film it, perform it, immortalize it and make it meaningful. In this fascinating, anecdotal exploration, award-winning author Simon Garfield has two simple intentions: to tell some illuminating stories, and to ask whether we have all gone completely nuts.
Here, Garfield explores the nature of time through stories such as: the Beatles learning to be brilliant in an hour and a half; an Englishman arriving back from Calcutta, refusing to adjust his watch; Beethoven's symphonic wishes being ignored; a US Senator's speech that goes for 25 hours; the horrors of war frozen at the click of a camera; a woman who designs a ten-hour clock and reinvents the calendar; Roger Bannister living out the same four minutes over a lifetime; and a who prince attempts to stop time in its tracks.
"Digressive, gossipy, thoughtful and thoroughly entertaining."— The Sunday Times, UK
Ratings and reviews
4.5
2 reviews
About the author
Simon Garfield is the author of seventeen acclaimed books of non-fiction including A Notable Woman (as editor), To the Letter, On the Map, Just My Type and Mauve. His study of AIDS in Britain, The End of Innocence, won the Somerset Maugham prize. www.simongarfield.com
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