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James Gleick. Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything. New York: Pantheon, 1999.
As we enter the new millennium, we have become a quickreflexed, multi-tasking, channel-flipping, fast-forwarding species. So says James Gleick in Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything.
Gleick, the author of Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman and Chaos: Making a New Science, provides dozens of examples, in 37 short chapters, which demonstrate human beings suffer from "hurry-sickness" (a term coined by Meyer Friedman, one of two California cardiologists who came up with the idea of the "Type-A personality"). For example, we wait impatiently for the elevator door to close or the traffic light to change. Instead we push the "close the door" and the "change to go" button even though they both have probably been...