The Book of Times: From Seconds to Centuries a Compendium of Measures (WilliamMorrow, 2013) is a compilation of intriguing facts on how long things take, how long things last, and how often things happen.
The Book of Times was excerpted, reviewed or noted in Vanity Fair, Real Simple, Parade, People, Forbes.com, The New York Post, Time.com, MentalFloss, The Iron Mountain Daily News, American Profile, The Columbian, and Yahoo!!
Forbes.com: “Alderman’s greatest achievement is the continual delivery of quirky knowledge that our collective curiosities crave.”
Time.com: “This clever and entertaining compendium contains everything you’d want to know about the ticking away of seconds, minutes, hours, days, years, decades and centuries.”
People: “Fascinated by how we spend—and waste—our most precious commodity, journalist Lesley Alderman gathered the sometimes-surprising stats for her debut, The Book of Times…”
MentalFloss: “…a fascinating foray into familiar terrain and a revealing look at how we really spend our lives.”
Yahoo!: “A new book confirms what most of us already suspect—timing is everything. In The Book of Times, which was published in early February, Lesley Alderman, a health and finance reporter, compiled data from hundreds of studies to offer insight into how we spend our time.”
New York Post: “Brooklyn journalist Lesley Alderman collects hundreds of surprising surveys from around the world revealing how we spend our hours.”
Parade Pick: “It takes 31 minutes to walk off a brownie. Shocked? Relieved? That’s the kind of quirky knowledge Lesley Alderman serves up in The Book of Times, a compendium of surprising measurements of everything from love affairs to mental functions. How much of our waking time do we spend daydreaming? Nearly half. How long does it take to have sex, on average? A brisk 19.2 minutes.”
The Columbian: “Read this book and you’ll find out how time impacts … areas of life such as love, work, money, and family.”
American Profile: “This handy-dandy little volume encourages us to consider [time] hundreds of fascinating ways, with charts, statistics, quirky tidbits, intriguing trivia and nuggets of research that reveal just how, exactly, we use the seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years of our lives—and how we can economize, prioritize and even put some lost minutes back on the clock. Burrowing down into the many interesting factoids of this infinitely browse-able tome, no matter how long you stay at it, makes for time well spent.
Iron Mountain Daily News: “The Book of Times is informative and entertaining and a marvelous way to while away the time on a business commute or a lazy afternoon.”