Book Review: Time Travel, a history

Time Travel, by James Gleick is subtitled " A history".  In it, Gleick traces the origins of the idea of "time travel", which did appear in a way as part of some stories from time to time (such as a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court), but that Wells' Time Machine made it explicit.  Paired with this is that physics, in the early 20th Century now also started investigating the nature of time as "the fourth dimension" of spacetime and that physicists were working on the mathematics to try to see if time travel a la Wells was allowed by Nature.  Gleick takes his cues from literature (mostly science fiction) and physics, launching into detailed discussions of the philosophical ramifications of the ideas.
Clearly from the fact that the chapters usually end in questions, time is something that humanity experiences constantly but it has a slipperiness that evades a good definition.  If somehow one could get outside of time to examine it from a different perspective one could make some sense of what it is.  But even this thought, if someone tries to clarify it, is found to be either so vague as to be meaningless or full of unresolvable paradoxes.  Every consideration regarding backward travel in time ends up into a discussion of determinism vs. free will.  Forward time travel at an increased rate is perfectly acceptable and there is a technical solution: park a space ship close to a black hole for a couple of days and when you head back to civilization, you will find centuries have passed.  So far, it seems that it is a one-way ticket though.
I have a hesitation in recommending this book.  If one has not thought deeply about the subject of time and time travel, there are many naïve thoughts that Gleick destroys, but one gets frustrated because I did not get the sense that something was suggested as backfill.  Further, since I am listening to it as an eAudiobook borrowed from the library, the convolutions created in some of the argumentation that I covered become unclear.  Some of the subtleties are not brought out in the contrast as well as I would have liked.  Nonetheless, there are many rewarding aspects and the book has been deeply researched.  The variety of references and sources, from Wells to Spock, philosophers to physicists, is astounding and surprising in some cases.  If you have thought philosophically about time and time travel and enjoy science fiction, then you will relish this book.  For the average person, it is ahead of its time.