Rosa Imperiale’s Against the Clock is the sort of nonfiction that leaves you unable to look at a wristwatch the same way. Her thesis is simple and unsettling: we did not discover time, we manufactured it.
Imperiale is a wonderful explainer and an even better provocateur. The chapters on the industrial standardization of the hour are worth the price alone.
"The factory whistle," she writes, "was the first machine to run on human beings."
The book occasionally overreaches, straining to make every development a conspiracy against leisure. But the core argument lands, and it lingers.
