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    The Book of Times: From Seconds to Centuries, a Compendium of Measures
    The Book of Times: From Seconds to Centuries, a Compendium of Measures
    The Book of Times: From Seconds to Centuries, a Compendium of Measures
    Ebook321 pages3 hours

    The Book of Times: From Seconds to Centuries, a Compendium of Measures

    By Lesley Alderman

    3/5

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    About this ebook

    “Clever and entertaining . . . contains everything you’d want to know about the ticking away of seconds, minutes, hours, days, years, decades and centuries.” —Time.com

    Our relationship to time is complex and paradoxical: Time stands still. Time also flies. Tomorrow is another day. Yet there’s no time like the present. We want to do more in less time, but wish we could slow the clock. And despite all our time-saving devices—smart phones, AI, high-speed trains—Americans feel that they have less leisure time than ever.

    In an era when our time feels fractured and imperiled, The Book of Times encourages readers to ponder time used and time spent. How long does it take to find a new mate, digest a hamburger, or compose a symphony? How much time do we spend daydreaming, texting, and getting ready for work? The book challenges our beliefs and urges us to consider how, and why, some things get faster, some things slow down, and some things never change (the need for seven to eight hours of sleep).

    Packed with compelling charts, lists, and quizzes, as well as new and intriguing research, The Book of Times is an addictive, browsable, and provocative look at the idea of time from every direction.

    “Alderman’s greatest achievement is the continual delivery of quirky knowledge that our collective curiosities crave.” —Forbes

    “Fascinated by how we spend—and waste—our most precious commodity, journalist Lesley Alderman gathered the sometimes-surprising stats for her debut, The Book of Times.” —People

    “A fascinating foray into familiar terrain and a revealing look at how we really spend our lives.” —Mental Floss
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateFeb 12, 2013
    ISBN9780062074195
    The Book of Times: From Seconds to Centuries, a Compendium of Measures

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    Reviews for The Book of Times

    3/5

    24 ratings9 reviews

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    • 2/5
      Mildly entertaining collection of miscellany around time, uses of, wastes of, blah blah blah. Not really worth the (however much) you'd spend at a bookstore. It felt to me like something I've stumbled across on the internet countless times in the past, but bundled into paper form and bound with a cheap cover. Since I got this free from the LT ER group, I can't/won't complain. It was, as I said, mildly interesting. -KA
    • 2/5
      I was very disappointed with this book. I love trivia and lists, but the individual entries aren't very interesting on their own, and the larger sections aren't cohesive enough to be worth reading as a group.
    • 2/5
      As one might expect, this is a collection of assorted factoids about time - more specifically, how people spend their time. It's not nearly as interesting as I'd hoped. For one thing, almost all the data is from surveys, and many of those are from internet surveys, and we all know how accurate those are. The results are often contradictory as well: for example, on one page we learn that smoking takes nine years off your life, but just two pages later we learn it's only four. This general lack of continuity isn't helped any by the large number of typos, some quite prominent. How long do rock banks last? I didn't understand until I read the list and realized it was supposed to be rock bands. In short, unless you are desperate for a book of trivia about how people may or may not actually spend their time, I'd suggest giving this one a miss.
    • 4/5
      I have spent my working life dealing with time and its measurement. Scheduling buses is perhaps more complicated than it seems on the surface. One has to deal with how much running time to give a bus by time of day, one needs to konw how many people are being carried, as that affects trip length besides customer satisfaction. One has to create 8-houur workdays for the the drivers, perhaps even workweeks that are close to 40 hours. The one must try to keep overtime vs. extra time given to make-up an 8 hour day at a minimum. One must detrmine how earlyor late a bus route runs, if it is not going to operate 24 hours. One must try to work in express or limited stop trips, and figure out how much branching of routes you want to do.So, I always like looking at books that deal with time and ones experience with it. Alderman looks at all kinds of expreience with time, like emergency room waits (shortest is in Iowa, longest in Utah); how long food may last (I couldn't find yoghurt, but sour cream can be kept 10-14 days after sell-by date). Looking at travel times, the fastest land trip between Chicago and Milwaukee is by train at 1:29 hours, the longest is 29 hours for walking. The book doesn't mention it, by my Official Railway Guide from 1958 shows trains abe to do this trip in 80 minutes.This is a fun book to look through. There are interactive questions, and you'll be surprsied at some of the answers.
    • 4/5
      This is a really interesting book, compiled by someone I suspect has a lot of time on his hands. The factoids are kinda fun and intriguing, quick to go through when you need to fill a few minutes (not a sit and read it through type of book)
    • 4/5
      This is a fun book. It's very like a bag of chocolate covered pretzels - enticing, hard to stop consuming, and best not too many at one sitting.The author is honest from the very beginning about the potential dubiousness of the data, so each bit of information should be taken with appropriate skepticism, but it's thoroughly entertaining. Some of the information made me want to delve deeper into the original research to find out how the studies were designed, others were so consistent with my own experience that I felt vindicated.A great book to carry for waiting in line, or to put in other places you want a little snack of reading.Worth reading more than once in little bits.
    • 2/5
      Trivia on how long things take. Probably one or two short sections here of mild interest to most trivia buffs. Perhaps best consumed as a "bathroom reader". Book design and layout good use some polishing. Not recommended.
    • 4/5
      The Book of TimesLeslie AldermanI’m an engineer, retired now, but I spent most of my life measuring television signals, baseband NTSC video. A system fairly well centered on relationships of time. So time, both in its measurement and in its use, is of interest to me.I enjoyed the book, but as I have an entire shelf of books of odd facts, or similar, this is not surprising. I started with this genre in about 8th grade, titled something like ‘Useless Information’. I don’t remember how long a line a standard pencil can draw, but it was in there.Many of the charts and facts do have source foot notes, those few I checked were accurate, which means this can be used as a source, or better a directory to primary sources. It would be better if it had an index, but the chapters are not that long, and fairly well separated in topics. So finding something would not be hard.I would fault the book designer, Diahann Sturge on multi-page charts, without column headings on any but the first page. And some of the charts could have been gotten on a single page, but moving side bars. So I give Ms Alderman a four not a five, she should have argued with the editor and the designer a bit harder on at least one of those points.
    • 4/5
      The author Lesley Alderman has compiled a fascinating set of facts about how we spend our time and other associations that we make on a daily basis concerning the division of time. Although time is real, it is still an eluding concept of which to make sense. It is a shadow that we chase and attempt to bottle up, but never able to fully grasp. However, the author gives some notable insights of how average people view temporal relationships as well as how science measures its passage in daily affairs. The book is a full-course compendium of statistics and other quotable facts, which can be great conversational pieces. In some respects, the book does have numerous trivia, and yet things such as "what is the average hospital stay" can tell much sociologically with respect to the places set in time. Also many references to worker and student productivity are implied in the stats. (Certainly I would hope the U.S. president would log more hours than a municipal worker.) An added feature of the book includes little exercises to calculate the reader's personal use of time, which compels me to hold onto the book for some time.

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    The Book of Times - Lesley Alderman

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