Gleick even gleaned information from on-line requests over the Internet. Those who seek a more stately, professorial perusal of this phenomenon will not find it here. This is not like his previous work Genius, the studied biography of physicist Richard Feynman. Here Gleick writes in a style in synch with his topic. He's loose, he's breezy, he's cruising along on warp drive.
Most chapters are no longer than seven or eight pages.
A keen observer and master of metaphor, Gleick shifts from theme to theme as if he were playing a well-honed series of jazz riffs. The full Globe review. Gleick, the author of Chaos and a biography of Richard Feynman, has stuffed his new book with tasty factoids about our fast, fast times. He reveals, for example, that those ''close door'' buttons in elevators are often just placebos, with no other function than to make us feel we've speeded up our trip. When we call 411 and ask for ''Uh, Domino's,'' a computer edits out the ''uh'' so it won't waste some operator's time.