★ 10/09/2017
British journalist and author Garfield (To the Letter) chronicles the very human obsession with time in this lively, wry, and captivating work of pop science. Garfield attributes his personal fascination with the topic to a bad bicycle accident that highlighted for him the way time seems to speed up or slow down depending on what a person is experiencing. From that entry point, Garfield traverses far and wide across his subject. The chapter “How the French Messed Up the Calendar” looks at the French Revolution–era plan to decimalize time with a 10-hour day and a French anarchist who in 1894 tried, unsuccessfully, to blow up the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England. Elsewhere in the book, Garfield tackles such topics as luxury watchmaking, political filibusters, and railway timetables, providing a sumptuous banquet of food for thought about how technology shapes the way we work, as well as how films are produced and music is written and performed. Here the “Doomsday Clock” of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and self-help books, including Thoreau’s Walden and modern texts on time management, become newly thought-provoking and laugh-out-loud funny. Exhibiting dry wit and fizzing with insatiable curiosity, Garfield collects enough eccentric characters, places, and ideas to entertain every reader. (Dec.)
Hugely enjoyable
There could be no better guide than Simon Garfield for this journey into time and its meaning for our lives. From the assembly line to the French Revolution, he covers the quirks of the clock with insight and wry enthusiasm. A riveting, educational read
Narrated in the highly inventive and entertaining style that bestselling author Simon Garfield is fast making his own.
Timekeepers by Garfield is an entertaining foray into how we’ve tried to control time or find meaning within it.
Garfield is an explainer, one of those dogged journalist-writers the British seem to have invented and produce in abundance. (His previous subjects include maps, type fonts, stamp collecting.) And so the hours here pass agreeably, full of fascinating facts, bits of storytelling and wonderful digressions.
There could be no better guide than Simon Garfield for this journey into time and its meaning for our lives. From the assembly line to the French Revolution, he covers the quirks of the clock with insight and wry enthusiasm. A riveting, educational read.
Exhibiting dry wit and fizzing with insatiable curiosity, Garfield collects enough eccentric characters, places, and ideas to entertain every reader.
Garfield is an engaging and lightly witty writer, and approaches his topic in a lot of thought-provoking ways, from investigating experimental calendars to talking about the watch that went to the moon
Engaging . . . Engrossing
Delightful . . . Gloriously funny . . . Garfield has an astonishing capacity for meticulous research and a wonderful ability to select the best stories to entertain us
Digressive, gossipy, thoughtful and thoroughly entertaining . . . Simon Garfield is an exuberant truffle-hound of the recondite and delightful factoid
A sort of museum between hard covers. Timekeepers is as good as pop history gets
Time well spent . . . Simon Garfield has made his name as an author who can spin fascinating narratives out of subjects that seem, on the face of it, narrow to the point of being dull
Delightful
Thoroughly enjoyable and illuminating . . . Stuffed with fascinating material
An eclectic collection of explorations of our relationships with time . . . Very readable
Delightful – unlike most books on time, it’s not scientific or philosophical; he has no interest in whether time is really an illusion or whether it existed before the Big Bang. Instead, he focuses on how human beings actually experience time. . . Mr. Garfield, a British journalist and author, maintains a light tone throughout.
One of those dogged journalist-writers the British seem to have invented and produce in abundance. (His previous subjects include maps, type fonts, stamp collecting.) And so the hours here pass agreeably, full of fascinating facts, bits of storytelling and wonderful digressions.
Garfield devotees and readers who relish this sort of breezy romp through temporal trivia will find it time well spent.
In this book, brilliant cultural historian Simon Garfield assembles a host of intriguing characters who have tried to bend time to their own rules, and questions how we came to be ruled by something so arbitrary
Delightful.
[A]n entertaining foray into how we’ve tried to control time or find meaning within it.
Garfield is an explainer, one of those dogged journalist-writers the British seem to have invented and produce in abundance. (His previous subjects include maps, type fonts, stamp collecting.) And so the hours here pass agreeably, full of fascinating facts, bits of storytelling and wonderful digressions.
Scholarly but jokey, with a magpie's appetite for glittering trivia, Garfield is as eager to amuse as to inform, and achieves both
Garfield's anecdotal, science-friendly book explores the tyranny of time and our desire to control it
