SOURCE: “Overload,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, September 12, 1999, p. 6.

In the following review of Faster, Gitlin concludes that Gleick's compilation of illustrative examples, although interesting, fails to provide substantive analysis of complex historical and societal issues.

Reader, you may be reading these words while nibbling on your morning Pop-Tart, or sipping a cup of microwaved coffee, or looking up from the Sunday morning cartoons or tennis or “Meet the Press.” You may have learned to speed-read, thereby saving valuable seconds that you may spend dipping into a game of Doom or, on your portable phone, hitting the redial button to try Ticketmaster again—or, much better, setting your Power-Dialer to try up to 25 times a minute—because, in pursuit of the latest hot ticket, which just went on sale and is already tying up tens of thousands of long-distance lines, you keep getting a busy signal. Or...