We've all experienced the tyranny of e–mail: the endless onslaught, the continual distraction, the superfluous messages clogging our inboxes. Freeman, acting editor of Granta magazine, captures viscerally the buzzing, humming megalopolis that tunes into this techno-rave of send and receive, send and receive. And he draws effectively on psychological and social research to describe the harm this tsunami of e-mail is causing: fragmenting our days, fracturing our concentration, diverting us from other sources of information and face-to-face encounters. His closing manifesto for a slow communication movement could fuel an e-mail rebellion, and his tips on how to slow down are sensible and mostly doable, except perhaps for the most hard-core e-mail addicts.