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Best Books of 2016 BOSTON GLOBE * THE ATLANTICFrom the acclaimed bestselling author of The Information and Chaos comes this enthralling history of time travel - a concept that has preoccupied physicists and storytellers over the course of the last century. James Gleick delivers a mind-bending exploration of time travel - from its origins in literature and science to its influence on our understanding of time itself. Gleick vividly explores physics, technology, philosophy, and art as each relates to time travel and tells the story of the concept's cultural evolutions - from H.G. Wells to Doctor Who, from Proust to Woody Allen. He takes a close look at the porous boundary between science fiction and modern physics, and, finally, delves into what it all means in our own moment in time - the world of the instantaneous, with its all-consuming present and vanishing future.
About the Author
James Gleick (born August 1, 1954) is an American author, journalist, and biographer, whose books explore the cultural ramifications of science and technology. Three of these books have been Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalists, and they have been translated into more than twenty languages. Born in New York City, USA, Gleick attended Harvard College, graduating in 1976 with a degree in English and linguistics. Having worked for the Harvard Crimson and freelanced in Boston, he moved to Minneapolis, where he helped found a short-lived weekly newspaper, Metropolis. After its demise, he returned to New York and joined as staff of the New York Times, where he worked for ten years as an editor and reporter. He was the McGraw Distinguished Lecturer at Princeton University in 1989-90. Gleick collaborated with the photographer Eliot Porter on Nature's Chaos and with developers at Autodesk on Chaos: The Software. In 1993, he founded The Pipeline, an early Internet service. Gleick is active on the boards of the Authors Guild and the Key West Literary Seminar. His first book, Chaos: Making a New Science, an international best-seller, chronicled the development of chaos theory and made the Butterfly Effect a household phrase. Among the scientists Gleick profiled were Mitchell Feigenbaum, Stephen Jay Gould, Douglas Hofstadter, Richard Feynman and Benoit Mandelbrot. His early reporting on Microsoft anticipated the antitrust investigations by the U. S. Department of Justice and the European Commission. Gleick's essays charting the growth of the Internet included the "Fast Forward" column on technology in the New York Times Magazine from 1995 to 1999 and formed the basis of his book What Just Happened. His work has also appeared in The New Yorker, the Atlantic, Slate, and the Washington Post. Bibliography:1987 Chaos: Making a New Science, Viking Penguin. (ISBN 0140092501) 1990 (with Eliot Porter) Nature's Chaos, Viking Penguin. (ISBN 0316609420) 1992 Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, Pantheon. (ISBN 0679747044) 1999 Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, Pantheon. (ISBN 067977548X) 2000 (editor) The Best American Science Writing 2000, HarperCollins. (ISBN 0060957360) 2002 What Just Happened: A Chronicle from the Electronic Frontier, Pantheon. (ISBN 0375713913) 2003 Isaac Newton, Pantheon. (ISBN 1400032954) 2011 The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. New York: Pantheon Books. (ISBN 9780375423727 )
