Book Review: Spend a few hours reading this book, it’s time well spent

In About Time, clock-loving historian David Rooney introduces us to some of the most fascinating examples, ancient and modern, that illustrate our species’ collective obsession with timekeeping.

This book focuses more on anthropology than horology. Like a clock face, About Time has twelve segments, each chapter taking one aspect of human endeavour as its starting point.

This is a pleasing but contrived structure, since some chapters could have been combined (or at least paired), such as ‘Virtue’ and ‘Morality’, ‘Markets’ and ‘Manufacture’, or ‘Empire’ and ‘War’.

Nonetheless, each chapter is so well constructed, so neatly engineered with facts, stories and exquisite details, that they are all delightful to read.

One of the many great anecdotes involves a member of Rooney’s family who was a finalist in the 1935 Golden Voice contest to become the woman behind the UK’s speaking clock.

Great books alter the reader’s view of the world, and About Time makes us look again at the ubiquitous public clock. Telling the time, it seems, has rarely been a simple matter of public service, and Rooney encourages us to be curious about who commissioned the timepiece, when and why.

He shows us that a clock, whatever its mechanism, is often powered by the objectives of the establishment, be it government, industry or religion.

Therefore, to be more aware of the clocks in our communities is to be more aware of the ways in which the lives and, too often, the freedoms of ordinary people have been regulated.

To end the book, Rooney chooses to strike an optimistic note regarding the role of timekeeping in world peace.

The chapter is more speculative than factual, but its message is important when there is a general feeling today that humanity’s time on Earth is running out.

All together, About Time is a well-written, entertaining, informative, and thought-provoking book, and reading it is time very well spent.