Jet Lag

by Christopher J. Lee

Overview

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. Lee's 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501323232
Publisher:	Bloomsbury USA
Publication date:	09/07/2017
Series:	Object Lessons
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	160
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Christopher J. Lee is Associate Professor of History at Lafayette College, USA. He has published four previous books and travels frequently.
Christopher J. Lee is an associate professor of history at Lafayette College, USA. He has published four previous books and travels frequently. His writing has appeared in Foreign Policy, Chronicle of Higher Education, Christian Science Monitor, Africa is a Country, The Point (Chicago), and the Mail & Guardian (South Africa).

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Esperanto of Jet Lag
1. The Romantic Machine
2. Babel's Clock
3. Circadian Rhythm and Blues
4. Heaven Up Here
Conclusion: Jet Lag as a Way of Life
Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

"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 Dalí, 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

From the Publisher