Physics Science

I had high hopes for this book, as a new entry in the generally terrific new series “Big Ideas, Small Books.” (If the name of the series seems a bit self-congratulatory, it’s easy to forgive that in exchange for their compulsively readable and clever pairings of authors and subjects: titles like Slavoj Zizek on violence or Jenny Diski on the Sixties should be on anyone’s list of the best recent mass-market titles for intellectuals.)

But this is simply an awful book; it’s a disorganized mass of superficial fluff that would be more at home as a bunch of trend pieces in TIME magazine than as a serious discussion of the nature and experience of time. It never coheres around any particular topic (”time” itself being so broad as to permit the book to cover anything at all), nor does it develop any single idea beyond the most vacuous level of ostensible insights about contemporary life. The book opens with an interesting, if already self-indulgent, memoirish introduction; this seems to set us up for a reflection on Hoffman’s experiences in communist Eastern Europe and later in the US, but no such continuous story follows. If it were not immediately dropped, Hoffman’s lapse into this (perhaps somewhat tired) genre of emigre reminiscence would at least promise a thread of personal narrative to connect — this is how Dubravka Ugresic’s brilliant philosophical fiction The Museum of Unconditional Surrender works (and to be clear, anyone who hasn’t read it should head straight to that book, and skip this one entirely).

But instead of a memoir, Hoffman gives us a series of meandering, superficial chapters on vapid, overbroad topics like “Time and the Body,” “Time and Culture,” or “Time in Our Time.” Rather than a thoughtful essay, each of these chapters is a collection of seemingly arbitrarily connected paragraphs, each citing (and often badly mangling) some set of factoids, and lamely parlaying each one into an attempted Deep Insight, before lurching to the next factoid in turn. Most of these paragraphs could have come straight from hackneyed trend articles in Newsweek or Wired (”Is Twitter Making Us Unable to Concentrate?”, that kind of thing), except that this would’ve implied better fact-checking — the book is studded with gems such as Hoffman’s po-faced paragraph on circadian rhythms, which informs us that a day is the time taken by the Earth to revolve around the Sun! In such a context readers will not, perhaps, be surprised that Hoffman proceeds to make a hash of Stephen Hawking and the anthropic principle, nor of Merleau-Ponty, nor of neuroscience, nor of the way computers work and the Internet’s effect on society — but, like some parodic cocktail-party “polymath,” so she does, making claims about all these things based, apparently, on expertise conferred by half-remembered sound bites.

The general drift of the book, anyhow, is that Our Modern Condition — a condition that “we” seem to know about from news clippings about technology, science, and culture, and from our personal store of anecdotal trivia — is Changing Our Relation to Time. But the details that would make any such claim interesting, worthy of debate or further thought, are never really filled in. Luckily the book is quite short, but even in the space allotted Hoffman somehow still manages the trick of seeming like a tiresome, shallow blowhard. A short book on some aspect of temporality written from a truly thoughtful philosophical, historical, social-theoretic, or even neurological-psychological perspective would have been a treat in this series. But readers who’d have wanted that should really look elsewhere to broaden their views of time and experience — at books like Michael Löwy’s new take on Walter Benjamin’s famous “On the Concept of History”, Istvan Meszaros on historical time, or, as mentioned above, Ugresic’s philosophical novel on the exile’s boredom.
Rating: 1 / 5

“Time” is an interdisciplinary, contemplative and often rambling look at the concept of that subject by author Eva Hoffman. Hoffman conceptually slices her discussions of time into four broad categories:

-body

-mind

-culture

-”time in our time”.

These dissections of time incorporate about as many “-ologies” as you can imagine: anthropology, sociology, biology, neurology and physiology; and that’s just for starters. Add some straight up physics, some classic Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford-inspired scientific management and frequent doses of literary treatments of time, (Shakespeare, Swift, de Bovier, Nabokov) garnish with some popular culture context (The Rolling Stones), and you are left with an interdisciplinary tour de force…if your measure is the frequency and quantity of references.

Regretably, outside of the four categorical divisions, the book lacks focus. Within each section, the prose meanders from question to question, often without meaningful segues. Hoffman drops so many names and disciplines into the mix that sometimes it seems like she’s just trying to prove her erudition.

Hoffman’s prose can be described in a single word: dense. The sentences are long, the paragraphs are longer (some entire pages contain only part of one paragraph), and the word selection is sometimes painful. The concepts are complicated enough, but the reader is then asked to overlay those on writing that includes words like “deterritorialism” and “paradigmatic”.

Even if we accept that complex topics demand complex writing, there are statements in this book so fundamentally flawed that they erode confidence in other conclusions. Hoffman claims: “Amphetamines or cocaine [are] used routinely by whole rafts of high flying professionals…” and “…these days the young turn to Ecstasy and other pill cocktails, while cocaine is the substance of choice for the upwardly mobile…likely to be taken to boost performance in the hyperspeeded sectors of the financial professions…” I’ve worked with “professionals” in the private and public sectors. While I don’t doubt I’ve worked with some who used both cocaine and amphetamines, I would not be easily convinced that their use was either “routine” or “widespread”. Unsubstantiated assertions don’t help Hoffman’s cause.

In the end, the broad range of art and science in the discussion don’t offer adequate illumination of a bottom line in her findings. Sleep patterns –especially abbreviated ones common to the developed world– are addressed at length. If you’re having trouble getting to sleep…this book might just help.
Rating: 1 / 5

Hoffman is clearly an intelligent writer with a knack for perceptive and critical analysis; her abilities manage to shine through despite a generally muddled and disorganized foray into examining time (as a subject in this book). Her objective in this svelte volume is to peer into our modern conception of Time, and to (presumably) open the doors for philosophical discussion. As a starting point, she is relatively good at her job: “Time” winds up being eminently read-able and accessible. It forges many pathways to further exploration and research, without being overwhelming in its informational content.

However, by the very nature of the subject, Hoffman is likely also dealing with an impossibly-complex subject; let alone in a very small book. Even in the best-case scenario, the subject matter is simply too vast to consider in such a small volume; Hoffman valiantly attempts to do too much in too small a space. She would have been best off simply choosing one or two conceptual discussions and leaving well enough alone.
Rating: 2 / 5