Timekeepers

A collection of essays on time, from hanging from the minute hand in a movie to the art of watchmaking. I found this a fascinating read and Simon's quirky humour really adds to the book. A sign of a good book is when I spend ages telling people about bits I've learnt, I had some great discussions about when we adopted modern time and the influence the railway had on that, living in this day it is really difficult to imagine the chaos of time in different cities around the UK.

Time also seems to have been affected in this book, the start mentions a moment when the author fell off his bike and when the same scene is mentioned in the epilogue it felt really weird so much time seemed to have passed.

The epilogue is the weakest part of the book, the last chapter ends perfectly, a long quote by the great Carl Sagan and some very moving words about death and that we don't have time to mourn properly these days, it was a fine ending and then the epilogue, a few pages about some bizarre watches, seemed a very odd way to end things, I don't really get it.

This is a top book on a topic many would find boring, give it a go, you don't have to read the whole thing in one go, dip in and out reading a chapter now and then, you'll take plenty from giving it a go.

Blog review: felcherman.wordpress.com/2021/03/29/timekeepers-how-the-world-became-obsessed-with-time-by-simon-garfield/

Rather than an in-depth study of time or a chronological history, Timekeepers is more like a collection of essays inspired by timekeeping in one way or another.

I already knew a little about how the railways forced Britain to nationalise time and the chapter concerning them filled in some gaps for me. I wonder if the act stating that clocks on public buildings must be kept accurate is still in force? Elsewhere Simon explores how artists have portrayed time and used clocks in their work, branching off to tell us about some of the more unusual calendars people have tried to adopt in the past.

I particularly liked the chapters regarding time in film and photography. There’s Muybridge (best known for his photographs of a horse galloping) and Nick Ut (famous for a single photo from Vietnam) and it talks about how photography manages to stop time. The early cinematographers could change the speed of time by their hand-cranking of the films…and then the projectionists could change it again when they showed the film. I had never realised that early film reel was turned by hand, no wonder it sometimes looks out of time.

I didn’t know that the Doomsday Clock was actually the cover of Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, introduced in 1947 to symbolise how close we are to nuclear disaster. The minute hand has moved back and forward ever since, showing how at peace the world is. You can check out the current time on their website if you’re intrigued…

Like many of these sort of books, there’s parts that appealed to me more than others. I skimmed over some of the bits describing Swiss watches, it was more about their appearance, materials and marketing than how they actually go about keeping time. The parts about modern time management just made me glad I wasn’t one of those kind of people (and some of the mantra’s seemed a bit too similar to puppy training to be taken seriously).

Review copy provided by publisher.