Jet Lag

(Paperback)

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Description

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Jet lag is a momentary condition resulting from the human body and its inner clock being pitched against the time-leaping effects of modern aviation. But more than that, it is a situation that explains time, technology, and the human body. Jet lag epitomizes the accelerated world we live in. It makes the speed and discomfort of globalization tangible on a personal level. Tracing physiological, temporal, technological, and cultural meanings, Christopher J. Lees Jet Lag ponders our intrinsic human limits in the face of modern innovation, revealing the latent costs of global cosmopolitanism today. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Reviews

Lee has a gift for making surprising yet apposite associations ... He is best, though, when contemplating the "global capitalist spectacle" of airports, with their unifying corporate flags for individual airlines and the ubiquitous brands displayed down polished corridors. * Times Literary Supplement *
In this beguiling book, Christopher J. Lee opens up the whole panorama of jetting off, arriving, and sleeping it off. From T. S. Eliot to Dal, from Chaplin to Lost in Translation, he shows how jet lag is the deep dark symptom of modern life's struggle with time. Jet Lag is a profound and witty meditation on a key secret of modernity. * Enda Duffy, Arnhold Presidential Department Chair, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA, and author of The Speed Handbook *
Jet Lag is a revelatory and compelling meditation on the temporal and affective dislocations of global capitalism. Christopher J. Lee lucidly maps the dissonant incompatibility between human beings and technological acceleration but he also insists on the importance of our imaginative cultural and aesthetic responses to the many systemic derangements of individual experience. * Jonathan Crary, Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory, Columbia University, USA, and author of 24/7 *
Jet Lag goes beyond the expected, leaving behind the simple science of this curious phenomenon to explore intriguing tangents inspired by the subject. A philosophical musing on the importance of sleep, a short essay exploring our relationship with flying, and even a musing upon jet lag as not only a physical phenomenon but a spiritual one as well. Lee manages to encompass quite a lot in less than 200 pages, delving into the consequences of modern convenience Jet Lag is no mere trivia book or brief primer on the subject; its one man pondering the relationship between humanity, gravity, time, and space. Four stars. * Tulsa Book Review *

Author Bio

Christopher J. Lee is Associate Professor of History at Lafayette College, USA. He has published four previous books and travels frequently.