Here are 27 books that Faster fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’ve been fascinated with the science and psychology behind sugar addiction ever since I started graduate school at Princeton University. When I was deciding what to study for my dissertation. I knew my topic needed to be something big, important, and meaningful. At the time, we were starting to hear about the dangers of obesity, and I wondered if it was due to our changing food environment, which had more and more sugar in it. I never would have imagined that this project would lead me to over 20 years of research. Learn all about it in my book Sugarless.
Fast food is everywhere you turn nowadays, which makes Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser such an important read for people of all ages and backgrounds. While reading, I was continuously fascinated to find out how ugly and disturbing the truth is behind America’s fast-food system.
With the obesity epidemic on the rise, I truly hope all children, adults, and older adults read this book and use the truth it teaches to change their lives for the better.
Now the subject of a film by Richard Linklater, Eric Schlosser's explosive bestseller Fast Food Nation: What the All-American Meal is Doing to the World tells the story of our love affair with fast food.
Britain eats more fast food than any other country in Europe. It looks good, tastes good, and it's cheap. But the real cost never appears on the menu.
Eric Schlosser visits the lab that re-creates the smell of strawberries; examines the safety records of abattoirs; reveals why the fries really taste so good and what lurks between the sesame buns - and shows how fast…
Writer, broadcaster, speaker. I used to be stuck in fast forward, rushing through life instead of living it. I finally realised I needed to slow down when I started speed reading bedtime stories to my son: my version of Snow White had just three dwarves in it! I went on to slow down – and became, in the words of CBC Radio, “the world's leading evangelist for the Slow Movement.”
Published in 1932, this essay hails from an era long before side hustles, smartphones and social media. And yet it still feels fresh and relevant today. Russell saw the cult of work as a form of social control – you keep people down by keeping them working. His view that more time for leisure would create a kinder, gentler society chimes with the Slow philosophy. In Praise of Idleness is a delicious paean to the art of doing things – or nothing at all – for the sheer joy of it.
Bertrand Russell is considered “the Voltaire of his time,” and Bradley Trevor Greive is considered one of the funniest people of his. Russell was a Nobel Laureate, and Greive is a New York Times bestselling author. Together, with Russell bringing the philosophy and Greive bringing the hilarious commentary, this book is a classic.
In his celebrated essay, In Praise of Idleness, Russell champions the seemingly incongruous notion that realizing our full potential―and thus enjoying the greatest possible success and happiness―is not accomplished by working harder or smarter, but through harnessing the extraordinary power of idleness.
Writer, broadcaster, speaker. I used to be stuck in fast forward, rushing through life instead of living it. I finally realised I needed to slow down when I started speed reading bedtime stories to my son: my version of Snow White had just three dwarves in it! I went on to slow down – and became, in the words of CBC Radio, “the world's leading evangelist for the Slow Movement.”
A gripping novel based on the life and death of John Franklin, a 19th century Arctic explorer. Franklin was by nature slow, and therefore out of step with the times. At school, other kids teased him for never having a ready comeback. Later, slowness became his superpower, a source of deep thinking, care, and wisdom. Franklin was an early avatar of the Slow movement!
Framing the life of the nineteenth-century explorer Sir John Franklin, this novel explores not only the adventures of his career, but also enters a world where the quality of life is considered in "slow motion", where ordinary experience becomes wholly new and unexpected.
The constellation we know as Taurus goes all the way back to cave paintings of aurochs at Lascaux. This book traces the story of the bull in the sky, a journey through the history of what has become known as the sacred bull.
Writer, broadcaster, speaker. I used to be stuck in fast forward, rushing through life instead of living it. I finally realised I needed to slow down when I started speed reading bedtime stories to my son: my version of Snow White had just three dwarves in it! I went on to slow down – and became, in the words of CBC Radio, “the world's leading evangelist for the Slow Movement.”
I love the way Kundera grapples with big ideas through finely-wrought fiction. I devoured this novel in a single sitting. It explores the romantic entanglements of characters who seem at first unconnected. But it's also a meditation on speed, technology, and slowness, and how these shape our experience of the world, other people, and ourselves. Kundera suggests that slowness opens the way to wisdom and sensuality, memory, and the milk of human kindness. A slower world, he seems to be saying, would be a better world. A beguiling journey through the philosophical underpinnings of the Slow movement.
Milan Kundera's lightest novel, a divertimento, an opera buffa, Slowness is also the first of this author's fictional works to have been written in French.
Disconcerted and enchanted, the reader follows the narrator of Slowness through a midsummer's night in which two tales of seduction, separated by more than two hundred years, interweave and oscillate between the sublime and the comic. Underlying this libertine fantasy is a profound meditation on contemporary life: about the secret bond between slowness and memory, about the connection between our era's desire to forget and the way we have given ourselves over to the demon…
My fascination with the Universe led me to become a high-energy physics and astrophysics researcher. I work at CERN (Geneva) working on elementary particles. Over many years, I have written and reviewed numerous scientific articles and served as the editor for two books. I have also reviewed books and co-written a few short popular science pieces. My reading interests encompass not only academic and literary works but also popular science, philosophy, and sociology. Understanding the Universe is difficult. With this collection, I hope to provide you with an authentic introduction to the study of the Universe and its evolution from various perspectives.
This book is about the attempts of physicists to understand the nature of time. The author tells the story of the concept of time from ancient Greece to the end of the 20th century through the progress in relativistic astrophysics, cosmology, and particle physics.
The best thing about the book is the anecdotes about great physicists with whom Novikov met in the former Soviet Union and in the West, such as Zeldovich, Guseinov, Longair, Hawking, and Trimble. I also like how Novikov shows the readers that many new phenomena and laws of nature are waiting to be discovered. It is also inspiring to learn about how physicists have been able to contribute to the understanding of nature even under very difficult situations.
Can we change the past? The surprising answer to this question can be found in the final chapters of this book. Novikov details the development of our views on time from classical Greece to the modern day, presenting the figures who have contributed to the evolution of our knowledge as real people and placing them in the context of their own time. He also describes in detail the current state of research in such areas as time machines, the start of time and why does time pass: areas on which he himself has worked. The author's own personal experiences, of…
I’m a time management coach, author, keynote speaker, host of the top 1% ranked time management podcast It’s About Time, and founder of the It’s About Time Academy (a community of people who want to make time for what matters most). I help busy professionals and business owners struggling with overwhelm manage their time with my signature HEART Method. I’ve been devouring time management books for over a decade now—so I hope you enjoy these time management reads as much as I did!
This book changed the way I think about time. It helped me incorporate biological chronotypes into my time management methods. After reading it, I realized that when you go with your flow, you get so much more done.
I love that this book is a great mix of science, stats, and introspective questions. One of my favorite things included are the action items throughout, and the concept of a nappuccino!
Timing is everything. But we don't know much about timing itself. Timing, it's often assumed, is an art; in When, Pink shows that timing is in fact a science.
Drawing on a rich trove of research from psychology, biology and economics, Pink reveals how best to live, work and succeed. How can we use the hidden patterns of the day to build the ideal schedule? Why do certain breaks dramatically improve student test scores? How can we turn a stumbling beginning into a fresh start? When should you have your first coffee of the day? Why is singing in time…
Marriage and Fatherhood in the Nazi SS
By
Amy Carney,
When I was writing this book, several of my friends jokingly called it the Nazi baby book, with one insisting it would make a great title. Nazi Babies – admittedly, that is a catchy title, but that’s not exactly what my book is about. SS babies would be slightly more…
My favorite books all show me that reality is much, much richer and stranger than it seems. And that is exactly what makes me write myself. Already as a child, I wanted the world to be different. I longed for the other, richer realities that were, I felt, just around the corner. So I started to travel, to Senegal and beyond, and learn about other people’s life experiences. When I became a researcher of world literature, it truly came home to me how one-sided my view of the world was. Ouch. Fortunately, there is a wealth of stories out there to tell us about everything we have been blind to.
Carlos Rovelli’sThe Order of Time is not at all a fantasy book—it is science—but nevertheless the most inspiring, life changing fantasy I’ve ever read. If I look around me with scientist Rovelli’s eyes, I too see that “the world is made up of networks of kisses, not of stones.” Beautiful, weird, and scientifically accurate. True fantasy!
One of TIME's Ten Best Nonfiction Books of the Decade
'Captivating, fascinating, profoundly beautiful. . . Rovelli is a wonderfully humane, gentle and witty guide for he is as much philosopher and poet as he is a scientist' John Banville
'We are time. We are this space, this clearing opened by the traces of memory inside the connections between our neurons. We are memory. We are nostalgia. We are longing for a future that will not come'
Time is a mystery that does not cease to puzzle us. Philosophers, artists and poets have long explored…
I am a professor of philosophy at Wake Forest University, with a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. I teach courses in the philosophy of space and time, the history of philosophy, and the philosophy of science. In addition to several authored and edited books on the philosophy of time, I have published many scholarly articles on time, perception, knowledge, and the history of the philosophy of time. I have always been attracted to the philosophy of time because time is quite simply at the root of everything: through the study of time we confront and illuminate the deepest possible questions both as to the nature of the physical world and as to the nature of human existence.
What is our ‘sense of time’, and why does it vary so much depending on circumstances and our state of mind? Cognitive psychologist Marc Wittmann explores the relationship between consciousness and the sense of being an embodied agent persisting through time. Drawing on cognitive science and neuroscience, he investigates the many factors that affect our experience of time, such as occupation, impulsivity, and mindfulness.
An expert explores the riddle of subjective time, from why time speeds up as we grow older to the connection between time and consciousness.
We have widely varying perceptions of time. Children have trouble waiting for anything. (“Are we there yet?”) Boredom is often connected to our sense of time passing (or not passing). As people grow older, time seems to speed up, the years flitting by without a pause. How does our sense of time come about? In Felt Time, Marc Wittmann explores the riddle of subjective time, explaining our perception of time—whether moment by moment, or in terms…
I am a research fellow at the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health in Freiburg, Germany. I studied Psychology and Philosophy at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland) and Munich (Germany) and have a Ph.D. in Medical Psychology from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Between 2004 and 2009 I was Research Fellow at the Department of Psychiatry, University of California San Diego. My research in the field of Cognitive Neuroscience is focused on the perception of time in ordinary and altered states of consciousness. The investigation concerning the riddle of subjective time as based on the embodied self leads me to answers of what matters most, the nature of our existence as self-conscious beings.
The debate on the nature of time between Henri Bergson, one of the most important philosophers at that time, and Albert Einstein, happened on April 6, 1922. Although many people believe that Einstein gained the upper hand in this showdown, comparable perhaps only with the ‘rumble in the jungle’ between Foreman and Ali in 1974, matters are more complicated. Jimena Canales has written a thriller about this clash of cultures fighting about time. She opens up a cosmos of philosophy and physics embedded in culture and shows how one hour of talk in 1922 still has relevance 100 years later for what it means to be human.
On April 6, 1922, in Paris, Albert Einstein and Henri Bergson publicly debated the nature of time. Einstein considered Bergson's theory of time to be a soft, psychological notion, irreconcilable with the quantitative realities of physics. Bergson, who gained fame as a philosopher by arguing that time should not be understood exclusively through the lens of science, criticized Einstein's theory of time for being a metaphysics grafted on to science, one that ignored the intuitive aspects of time. The Physicist and the Philosopher tells the remarkable story of how this explosive debate transformed our understanding of time and drove a…
A fresh take on the difference between trauma and hardship in order to help accurately spot the difference and avoid over-generalizations.
The book integrates the latest findings in brain science, child development, psycho-social context, theory, and clinical experiences to make the case that trauma is much more than a cluster…
I’m an archaeologist, which means that I’ve been lucky enough to travel to many places to dig and survey ancient remains. What I’ve realized in handling those dusty old objects is that all over the world, in both past and present, people are defined by their stuff: what they made, used, broke, and threw away. Most compelling are the things that people cherished despite being worn or flawed, just like we have objects in our house that are broken or old but that we keep anyway.
This looks like it’s the sternest and most boring book ever, but I love Steedman’s cool-and-collected ability to address the implications of the obvious: You can only do one thing at a time. You only have two hands. And when you’re with one set of belongings, you’re neglecting all the other stuff you own.
Standard economic theory of consumer behaviour considers consumers' preferences, their incomes and commodity prices to be the determinants of consumption. However, consumption takes time and no consumer has more - or less - than 168 hours per week. This simple fact is almost invisible in standard theory, and takes the centre stage in this book.
