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Rating: 
Summary: Time well spent
Review: "A Geography of Time" is an almost-excellent study of perception of time, and how this perception is affected by culture and location. A new vocabulary is introduced to the reader, along with a host of new ideas about time, including "event time," "natural time," and the familiar "clock time." The author's research is enlightening and challenging.The concepts are easy to absorb, and the subject is well-researched and documented. I have no doubt that Levine's work is strong. Some of the work involves providing evidence for well-known concepts, such as bigger cities have a faster pace than smaller cities. Interesting correlations are drawn between the pace of a location and the accuracy of it's timepieces. I found the concept of being able to train oneself to elongate and condense time perception to be particularly interesting, such as in the case of a martial artist who moves fast by forcing an opponent to appear to move slow. Other interesting tidbits include the "contradiction of Japan," which shows that an ultra-fast paced life can be balanced out with cultural rules to prevent aggression, and how a slow-paced city is not necessarily kinder than a fast-paced city. The reason why "A Geography of Time" is only almost-excellent is due to the author's skills as a writer. Ideas are not presented in a structured manner, information is redundantly repeated and personal opinions are freely mixed with research and evidence. Some difficult concepts, such as Einstein's time dilatation in Special Relativity are introduced as window dressing for what amounts to a sociological subject. A brief history of the introduction of clocks in America is included. The last chapter is almost a "self help" opinion piece by the author, on how to use knowledge of time to greatest advantage. All in all, while the research is interesting and the concepts are worth reading, the book would have benefited from a tighter focus on the author's part. The book wander's lazily from concept to concept, and hurts the material overall. All in all, worth reading and enjoyable, but falling just short of the mark.
Rating:
Summary: Time well spent
Review: "A Geography of Time" is an almost-excellent study of perception of time, and how this perception is affected by culture and location. A new vocabulary is introduced to the reader, along with a host of new ideas about time, including "event time," "natural time," and the familiar "clock time." The author's research is enlightening and challenging. The concepts are easy to absorb, and the subject is well-researched and documented. I have no doubt that Levine's work is strong. Some of the work involves providing evidence for well-known concepts, such as bigger cities have a faster pace than smaller cities. Interesting correlations are drawn between the pace of a location and the accuracy of it's timepieces. I found the concept of being able to train oneself to elongate and condense time perception to be particularly interesting, such as in the case of a martial artist who moves fast by forcing an opponent to appear to move slow. Other interesting tidbits include the "contradiction of Japan," which shows that an ultra-fast paced life can be balanced out with cultural rules to prevent aggression, and how a slow-paced city is not necessarily kinder than a fast-paced city. The reason why "A Geography of Time" is only almost-excellent is due to the author's skills as a writer. Ideas are not presented in a structured manner, information is redundantly repeated and personal opinions are freely mixed with research and evidence. Some difficult concepts, such as Einstein's time dilatation in Special Relativity are introduced as window dressing for what amounts to a sociological subject. A brief history of the introduction of clocks in America is included. The last chapter is almost a "self help" opinion piece by the author, on how to use knowledge of time to greatest advantage. All in all, while the research is interesting and the concepts are worth reading, the book would have benefited from a tighter focus on the author's part. The book wander's lazily from concept to concept, and hurts the material overall. All in all, worth reading and enjoyable, but falling just short of the mark.
Rating: 
Summary: Time, Place, Pace: New ways to think about our creation.
Review: A Geography of Time, by Robert Levine, discusses time as few may have previously considered it in their daily pursuits. Through personal experience, via a sabbatical, Levine offers keen insights into the rhythms of life as experienced by peoples and places the world over. Offering "tempo" and what he calls "clock time" and "event time," as points of departure in an analysis of his and his colleagues observations, Levine successfully illustrates how not only "personality types" impact a region, but also how the region impacts the personality as well, thus revealing the symbiotic relationship between the person or persons and place or places respectively.
By traversing not only the globe, but the subject of time as well, Levine has allowed readers to come closer to understanding their world and those of others with whom they come in contact. Of his main points, Levine successfully argues that we are oriented to clock-time, event-time, or "multitemporality," i.e., psychological androgyny. [Of this in between time and state of mind, Levine shows that we are better served in such a space than that of being exclusively in one or the other of either clock or event time; especially as it relates to our social, physical and psychological well being.]
Two chapters considered interesting by this reviewer are chapters one and ten. Due to the foundation established in chapter one regarding "tempo," and the last wherein Levine offers practical solutions to balance our activities and potentially lead healthier and happier lives, A Geography of Time, is not only a delightful read, it is also enormously illuminating. By providing an approachable perspective for consideration, as it relates to human activity and interaction, i.e., tempo, coupled with personal and collegial anecdotes, Levine has broached the subject of the relativity of time and pace with considerable depth and admirable precision.
In chapter one, "Tempo: The Speed of Life," Levine shows how humans, despite best efforts of social constructionists, still "march to the beat of different drummers." Borrowing from the field of music, the element of tempo, Levine notices, along with colleagues who have both traveled and lived in other countries, that not only do people have different rhythms in locales the world over, but that there seem to be distinguishable characteristics of and between the places as well. In asking the question, "what characteristics of places and cultures make them faster or slower?" Levine posits two elements for consideration: "economic well-being" and "degree of industrialization." With these elements in mind, Levine, in later chapters, develops some rather interesting and amusing ways to determine not only people's level of helpfulness in a specific locale, but also the pace of locales observed.
In chapter ten, "Minding your time, Timing your Mind," Levine successfully answers the "so what?" question. By illustrating that there are significant and avoidable consequences to certain tempos, he offers practical suggestions for a new way of not only interacting with members from different locales, but also for simply living. In coupling "lessons" learned in chapter nine, with ideas regarding middle-time in chapter ten, readers will come away from Levin's work with a clearer understanding not only themselves as "paced" individuals, but also how pace affects others in their midst. With this newfound knowledge, if put into practice, readers are sure to be in a better mental space for having been so informed.
As with any work, it has both its high and low points. With Levine's A Geography of Time, there are a few that deserve mention. However, for the sake of space and time, I will relegate my comments to chapters with the most "lows." That being said, chapters three and seven: "A Brief History of Clock Time," and "Health, Wealth, happiness, and Charity" respectively deserve my attention in this regard.
In chapter three, Levine discusses the "history of clock time," but omits some important elements for consideration. Having presented good historical information regarding the emergence of both watches and time zones in America, with the latter having ties to the railroad industry, it would have been illuminating to understand more about the socialization process of convincing the mass of people to accept this new way of thinking about the day. Another missed opportunity is found in the lack of in-depth discussion surrounding the carving up of the day into units of time, i.e., the twenty-four hour period and the sixty-minute hour. Perhaps a discussion of this element of the social construction of time would have lent more meat to a good beginning to the question of time and its social meaning.
Additionally, given his discussions of "time zones," it would have been equally revealing to read of the need for the creation of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), as it relates to globalization and economics. Not to mention the politics surrounding the choice of Greenwich as the focal point around which time has been socially constructed. Given that the Giza Plateau in Egypt is the geographical center of the pre-plate tectonic shifting of the earth's land mass; which for logical reasons seems a truer fit for the center of a "time-line," perhaps a discussion of some of the then discussions surrounding this event and its consequences, both pro and con, would have been a more just treatment of not only time in America, but around the globe as well; all of which serve as social tethers to and for time, clocks, watches, and socialization alike.
In chapter seven, while discussing "health, wealth, happiness, and charity," Levine merely makes allusion to that intangible something that gives a place its certain "feeling." In omitting this element of the place, Levine opts not to reveal the evident, but intangible components of a respective locale. Beyond stating, "our data strongly support the notion that cities, too, can be Type A" (as in personality). Perhaps it is in his "silence" on this subject that one may find some substance for consideration. For him with eyes and ears, this element is quite revealing.
Overall, Levine's work is compelling in that it reveals elements of our daily lives that provide clues as to how we have come to be that which we are: either a clock-time or event-time person, or some "androgynous" realization of the best of both worlds. In presenting this work, Levine has allowed for a clearer understanding of not only other locales around the world, their paces and people, but also those closer to home as well. In so doing, he has given the traveler and non-traveler alike, an opportunity to broaden their perspective on different cultures and potentially foster an even greater understanding of new peoples and societies with their time and pace peculiarities. Should the ideas be both understood and employed by readers, a level of respect will not only emerge for different cultures, but a more profound understanding of one's own culture as well; for this and many other reasons Levine's work should be praised.
Rating: 
Summary: Intellectual Abstraction
Review: I enjoyed the book up until page 111. There the author compared a person being late for an appoinment in Brazil as being somehow comparable to the murder of women in Arab cultures by members of their own family. How those two situations are even faintly comparable is beyond me. If that woman who is being murdered in the name of "protecting an important social institution" were known by the author he might be able to disengage from intellectual abstraction and acknowledge the inhumanity and horror the murder of these women in the name of "honor" actually represents.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting ideas
Review: I had to read this book for a sociology class this year. The author uses anecdotes to discuss cultural variances of time. However, the text lacks substantial historical explanations that address why these variances exist. This is a fun collection of observations. an easy read
Rating:
Summary: Interesting Enough, but it was required
Review: I had to read this book for a sociology class this year. The author uses anecdotes to discuss cultural variances of time. However, the text lacks substantial historical explanations that address why these variances exist. This is a fun collection of observations. an easy read
Rating:
Summary: A winning combo of research/experience/insight
Review: I've been aware of Levine's work on "time" for more than a decade from articles and such, and I was thrilled to see this book. It's the best of its ilk: good qualitative research, heavily based on personal experience, written anecdotally and fascinatingly. I see this as akin to Deborah Tannen's excellent work in "You Just Don't Understand." If only more people were aware of how relative our cultural assumptions are, it might prevent some hair-tearing as we travel and also prevent some frustration here at home when we come upon others (even our own spouses....) who have another way of thinking/feeling about time.
Rating:
Summary: Slow down, Mr Levine
Review: The subject of time is fascinating. It's origins, how we measure it, adjusting for it when we travel, and it's interrelationship with geography in how we discovered our world. Much of this has been written about elsewhere. TIME LORD and LONGITUDE being two recent examples and Mr Levine does touch on some of the same topics - the history of the clock for example. A GEOGRAPHY OF TIME however takes a different slant and looks more closely at time as a cultural element. How, depending on where you live - small town, big city, here in the US or elsewhere in the world - your perception and appreciation of time varies. We measure it the same way but it simply does not mean the same thing to each of us. This was brought home to the author from his time spent in Brazil. Sure an hour is still 60 minutes, but it's just that it starts later in Brazil. In other words while we in the US would mentally start counting our hour, logically from 10.01, many elsewhere subconsciously begin at about 10.15! Time does not always have to be that structured, formal, or even scientific and that is the only problem with this book. Differences in perception and respect for time around the world are well known and part of traveler's lore and horror stories. The attention the book devotes to measuring it allows Mr Levine to develop a 36 item checklist of the fastest and slowest US cities. This bit of temporal tenacity though simply provides facts but does not really add much to our enjoyment of this quirky commodity. I would suggest that Mr Levine slow down a bit with all this seriousness about time. Our collective obsession with mastering time could sometimes take a healthy back seat to those who have long ago learned how to occasionaly let it slide.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting ideas
Review: This book is interesting for the issues it raises, and it is not a difficult read, but there are some disappointments as well. I am told that his research is sound, but haven't reviewed it personally past abstracts. He continues his research presently from CSU Fresno. The ideas and annecdotes are interesting, and since the orignal version, Levine has continued to publish research on this subject. As a book to introduce someone to issues of time and culture in a semi-structured way, this is not bad. Unfortunately, there is something a little ... annoying about the tone in the book, and sadly, from what I can tell by other communications, it comes directly from the author. When telling a story, he's engaged and interested (in writing and otherwise). When the scholarship is the issue, we get less responsiveness, and more rushed pithiness, which is a shame, really. One just can't escape the sense of judgment sometimes in the text. If there is an update to the text from the original version, let us hope he has expanded some of his original studies to concentrate less on California - a huge portion of his population in the studies in the book - and include other place, both in and outside the USA. If you have an interest in time, psychology, social behaviour, or some combination of the above, it's not an awful read.
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