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tudlio 's review for:
Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock
by Jenny Odell
In the author acknowledgements Odell thanks her editor Hilary Redmond for her, "...ability to render my language more accessible." Although in general I found the book engaging, meaningful and a worthwhile read, I could have used more 0f Hilary Redmond's attention.
Odell's style is sometimes poetic, sometimes academic, and sometimes a mix of the two. I'm not sure why I found it hard to parse, maybe because no single mode of reading worked for the whole book. Whatever the reason, I often found I'd read a paragraph or a page without anything really registering.
That notwithstanding, there were sections that really hit home and made me question my relationship with time, especially in the context of work. From the introduction: “[T]he roots of modern [time] management can readily be found on West Indian and Southern U.S. plantations in the 18th and 19th centuries.” Odell observes that capitalism dehumanizes time to make it fungible and priceable, and in so doing necessarily dehumanizes the lived experience of working. I’ve had the privilege for most of my career of doing work I enjoy doing, for purposes I believe in, at companies that have a very enlightened conception of time management. But even then I’ve often felt a kind of induced meaningless to work that, until reading this book, I had a hard time describing.
I particularly appreciated the first chapter (“Whose Time, Whose Money”), chapter three (“Can There Be Leisure?”), and chapter four (“Putting Time Back in Its Place”), but would recommend the book (with the reservations noted above) for anyone interested in contemplating, as Odell invites us to do, how our relationship with time structures our lives.
Odell's style is sometimes poetic, sometimes academic, and sometimes a mix of the two. I'm not sure why I found it hard to parse, maybe because no single mode of reading worked for the whole book. Whatever the reason, I often found I'd read a paragraph or a page without anything really registering.
That notwithstanding, there were sections that really hit home and made me question my relationship with time, especially in the context of work. From the introduction: “[T]he roots of modern [time] management can readily be found on West Indian and Southern U.S. plantations in the 18th and 19th centuries.” Odell observes that capitalism dehumanizes time to make it fungible and priceable, and in so doing necessarily dehumanizes the lived experience of working. I’ve had the privilege for most of my career of doing work I enjoy doing, for purposes I believe in, at companies that have a very enlightened conception of time management. But even then I’ve often felt a kind of induced meaningless to work that, until reading this book, I had a hard time describing.
I particularly appreciated the first chapter (“Whose Time, Whose Money”), chapter three (“Can There Be Leisure?”), and chapter four (“Putting Time Back in Its Place”), but would recommend the book (with the reservations noted above) for anyone interested in contemplating, as Odell invites us to do, how our relationship with time structures our lives.