Author James Gleick will speak at Friends of the Library Feb. 27

Monday, Feb. 27, the Key West Friends of the Library will welcome acclaimed author, James Gleick to the podium to participate in its ongoing lecture series. The talks, which begin promptly at 6:00 p.m. are at the Key West Theater, 512 Eaton St. and begin promptly at 6:00 p.m. Seating begins at 5:30 on a first come first served basis. Admission is free.

James Gleick writes about science and technology. His first book, Chaos, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Other books include the best-selling biographies, Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman and Isaac Newton, both also short-listed for a Pulitzer, as well as Faster, and What Just Happened. His latest book is Time Travel: A History. His writings has been translated into thirty languages.

Gleick was one of the founders of “The Pipeline”, a New York City-based predecessor to the modern internet. He has also been an editor at the New York Times and a lecturer at Princeton University.

While acknowledging the scientific impossibility of time travel, in his new book Gleick examines how the concept takes up so much space in our collective consciousness. “Why do we need time travel, when we already travel through space so far and fast? For history. For mystery. For nostalgia. For hope. To examine our potential and explore our memories. To counter regret for the life we lived, the only life, one dimension, beginning to end,” he writes.

Maria Popova on the books and culture website Brain Pickings, called Time Travel “a grand thought experiment, using physics and philosophy as the active agents, and literature as the catalyst . . .What emerges is an inquiry . . . into why we think about time, why its directionality troubles us so, and what asking these questions reveals about the deepest mysteries of human consciousness.”

“Time Travel, like all of Gleick’s work, is a fascinating mash-up of philosophy, literary criticism, physics and cultural observation. It’s witty. . . pithy . . . and regularly manages to twist its reader’s mind into Gordian knots . . .” wrote Anthony Doerr in the New York Times. For more information go to http://friendsofthekeywestlibrary.org and click on lecture series.

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