Timekeepers: How the World Become obsessed with Time

Today’s post is on Timekeepers: How the World Become obsessed with Time by Simon Garfield. It is 349 pages long including index and further readings and is published by Canongate. The cover is blue with a clock face on it. The intended reader is someone is interesting in the history of time and timekeeping. There is no foul language, no sex, and no violence in this book.  There Be Spoilers Ahead.

From the back of the book-  Not so long ago we timed our lives by the movement of the sun. These days our time arrives atomically and insistently, and our lives are propelled by the notion that we will never have enough of the one thing we crave the most. How have we come to be dominated by something so arbitrary?
The compelling stories in this book explore our obsessions with time. An Englishman arrives back from Calcutta but refuses to adjust his watch. Beethoven has his symphonic wishes ignored. A moment of war is frozen forever. The timetable arrives by steam train. A woman designs a ten-hour clock and reinvents the calendar. Roger Bannister becomes stuck in the same four minutes forever. A British watchmaker competes with mighty Switzerland. And a prince attempts to stop time in its tracks.
Timekeepers is a vivid exploration of the ways we have perceived, contained and saved time over the last 250 years, narrated in the highly inventive and entertaining style that bestselling author Simon Garfield is fast making his own. As managing time becomes the greatest challenge we face in our lives, this multi-layered history helps us tackle it in a sparkling new light.

Review- Garfield starts this book with thinking about when time slowed down for him. He was in an accident and time seemed to slow down as he experienced it. That started him thinking about time and how we interact with this thing that rules so much of our lives. Garfield writes about how time has changed over the course of centuries, how it started with trains making everyone work on the same time, and how watches are made. He spends many chapters of the book about watches and how they have affected society. He spends a day watching a movie with every scene taking place at a particular time and to see the whole movie you have to spend a whole day watching it. The research, as always from Garfield, is excellent and the ideas expressed are interesting. That said, I had some trouble connecting with Garfield this time. In the past when I started one of his books, I was drawn into immediately but not so with this one.I still enjoyed it but it took time for me to be invested in this book. 

I give this book a Four out of Five stars. I get nothing for my review and I borrowed this book from my local library.