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Book Cover for: Timekeepers: How the World Became Obsessed with Time, Simon Garfield

Timekeepers: How the World Became Obsessed with Time

Simon Garfield

Paperback
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Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana. The Beatles learn to be brilliant in an hour and a half. An Englishman arrives back from Calcutta but refuses to adjust his watch. Beethoven has his symphonic wishes ignored. A US Senator begins a speech that will last for 25 hours. The horrors of war are frozen at the click of a camera. A woman designs a ten-hour clock and reinvents the calendar. Roger Bannister lives out the same four minutes over a lifetime. And a prince attempts to stop time in its tracks. Timekeepers is a book about our obsession with time and our desire to measure it, control it, sell it, film it, perform it, immortalise it and make it meaningful. It has two simple intentions: to tell some illuminating stories, and to ask whether we have all gone completely nuts.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Canongate Books
  • Publish Date: Dec 4th, 2018
  • Pages: 368
  • Language: English
  • Edition: Main - undefined
  • Dimensions: 7.75in - 5.13in - 1.00in - 0.60lb
  • EAN: 9781782113218
  • Categories: • Time• General

About the Author

Garfield, Simon: - 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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What people are saying

Praise for this book

Delightful.----Wall Street Journal
"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."----Daniel Pink, author of Drive
"Garfield devotees and readers who relish this sort of breezy romp through temporal trivia will find it time well spent."----Booklist
"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."----Dallas Morning News
"A lively, wry, and captivating work of pop science . . . exhibiting dry wit and fizzing with insatiable curiosity."----Publishers Weekly, starred
"[A]n entertaining foray into how we've tried to control time or find meaning within it."----Toronto Star

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