The Tyranny of E-mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox

We live in a culture devoted to technology, and yet most of us cannot find the time to consider its history or its consequences. John Freeman has made the time, and he has thought carefully about how we have gotten here. The average office worker sends and receives some two hundred e-mails a day. Sixty-five percent of Americans spend more time with a computer than with a spouse. Our minds are frequently distracted by a buzz, beep, or blink of light from a handheld device. Our eyesight is getting poorer and our attention spans shorter. But in The Tyranny of E-mail, Freeman takes pains to point

culture June/July/Aug 2009

117 Days

“I was bereft of human contact and exchange. What was going on in the outside world? No echoes reached me. I was suspended in limbo, unknowing, unreached.” Ruth First’s powerful, spare account of her four-month solitary confinement in 1963 under South Africa’s ninety-day detention law is a personal memoir, but it also serves as a group portrait of a movement. Folded into the meticulous details of her internment—interrogations; the sounds, smells, and routines of prison life; impressions of the guards; the effects of deprivation and psychological torture on her active mind—are the stories of