Let's cut to the chase: Faster disappoints. James Gleick's Chaos: Making a New Science was a marvel of clarity and beauty, deserving its status as one of the best-selling popular science books of the last two decades. Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman made a complex, elusive figure human, and contained just the right mix of physics and storytelling. So when I heard that Gleick was coming out with a book about time, I expected a serious exploration of time's role in relativity, or chronologists' quest for accuracy, or perhaps the neurology of time perception, leavened with character sketches and anecdotes and cultural references (all of which Gleick excels at). But Faster gives the leavening without the bread.

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