London-based Canadian journalist Carl Honoré has seen the evils of the fast-paced world. When he found himself trying to read his child one-minute bedtime stories, he decided enough was enough. Honoré serves up a neo-Zen, less-is-more manifesto with In Praise of Slow. Ironically, he does this through what appears to be a regimen of frantically paced travel.

Honoré provides plenty of anecdotal evidence that people are fed up with the fast-paced world of 21st-century hyper-capitalism, with its attendant burnout, ulcers, heart attacks, latchkey kids, road rage, low-nutrition meals, and noxious TV as wallpaper/babysitter/narcotic. However, it’s open to debate whether there is, in fact, a worldwide connection between distant pockets of people longing for Tantric sex, super-slow workouts, home schooling, Chinese medicine, slow food, and pedestrian-friendly neighbourhoods.

It’s difficult to muster much sympathy for harried, “time-poor” urbanites who fail to find time to make home-cooked meals or enjoy museums when there is a much bigger cult of water-poor, housing-poor, food-poor, human rights-poor (but civil war-rich) people known as The Rest of the World.

Only those who have it all – i.e., decadent North Americans and Western Europeans – have the temerity to proselytize that less is more. However much Honoré insists that the slow lane isn’t only for “affluent epicures,” it seems that’s exactly for whom his slow “revolution” is made.

With multiple real-life examples, Honoré covers off how slowing down can improve food, digestion, our cities, our minds and bodies, medicine, sex, work, leisure time, and our children. He’s right, of course, but it’s like arguing for sunsets – nobody can seriously argue that slowly eating a homemade meal isn’t preferable to a microwaved chunk of generic meat, or that the world could use fewer SUVs.

By the end, Honoré seems to be advocating not slowness but rather the right pace, the tempo giusto – slow for some things, fast for others. This backtracking doesn’t inspire confidence in an already diffuse thesis. Perhaps Honoré’s book itself will act as a catalyst for the disparate elements of the slow movement, but it may take a while.