Includes bibliographical references and index.

Pacemaker -- Life as Type A -- The Door Close Button -- Your Other Face -- Time Goes Standard -- The New Accelerators -- Seeing in Slow Motion -- In Real Time -- Lost in Time -- On Internet Time -- Quick--Your Opinion? -- Decomposition Takes Time -- On Your Mark, Get Set, Think -- A Millisecond Here, a Millisecond There -- 1,440 Minutes a Day -- Sex and Paperwork -- Modern Conveniences -- Jog More, Read Less -- Eat and Run -- How Many Hours Do You Work? -- 7:15. Took Shower -- Attention! Multitaskers -- Shot-Shot-Shot-Shot -- Prest-o! Change-o! -- MTV Zooms By -- Allegro ma Non Troppo -- Can You See It? -- High-Pressure Minutes -- Time and Motion -- The Paradox of Efficiency -- 365 Ways to Save Time -- The Telephone Lottery -- Time Is Not Money -- Short-Term Memory -- The Law of Small Numbers -- Bored.

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.