Reviews of three new books. In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution by Susan Brownmiller (Delta, 360 pages, $14.95)     Is feminism obsolete? That f-word seems almost quaint in this age of Oprah and Martha and kick-ass Charlie's Angels. Yet women make up only around 10 percent of Congress, Fortune 500 leaders are virtually all white and male, and domestic abuse and rape are far from rare. We've traded in substantive gains for surface ones, it seems. It's enough to make you long for the time before feminism was "post," when pissed-off women first stormed the Miss America pageant and occupied the offices of the Ladies Home Journal. Susan Brownmiller, the activist who wrote the pioneer anti-rape book Against Our Will, recalls those heady days of '70s feminism in her new book, In Our Time. It's less a memoir, as the title suggests, and more of a history. The pinning down of names and dates can be overwhelming, but on the whole the book provides a fascinating assessment of the movement. Brownmiller is passionate about the cause, yet withering in her criticism of the infighting and self-sabotage that existed. Some women in her account come out looking better than expected, such as Gloria Steinem, but some come out surprisingly worse. Barbara Walters, for example, wasn't exactly "with the cause." After Walters interviewed Brownmiller in 1975, the famed TV journalist revealed she had worn a low-cut dress so that "one of us, at least, wouldn't appear anti-male." In Our Time is a thought-provoking, valuable book that makes you want to get off your back and breathe new life into the feminist movement. Because, glossy magazine covers aside, there's still a lot of work to do. Kathleen Hildenbrand Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything by James Gleick (Vintage Books, 330 pages, $14)     Got a minute? James Gleick doubts it. The man who brought lucidity to such abstruse, impenetrable subjects as chaos theory and Richard Feynman now turns his Promethean eye on time itself. With Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, just published in paperback by Vintage, Gleick sets out to capture, in a literal sense, the zeitgeist--to grasp the slippery spirit of time and the ever-tightening grip it seems to have on us. In bite-sized chapters, some just a few pages long, he looks at concentrations of hurry sickness: an editing room at CNN, where a three-minute segment is considered "long-form"; a directory assistance center in New York, where software edits out your "umm..." and operators answer 200 requests an hour; a couch in San Francisco, whose occupant can watch five programs simultaneously in most un-spudlike fashion. "Instantaneity rules in the network and in our emotional lives," Gleick writes. "Instant coffee, instant intimacy, instant replay, and instant emotional gratification." None of this comes as a surprise to his readers, of course, and he doesn't expect it to. "We humans have chosen speed and we thrive on it," he writes. "If we have learned the name of just one hormone, it is adrenaline." Gleick's writing sates our adrenaline jones, throwing out examples and drawing connections at a neuron-popping pace. Unfortunately, the structure panders to our abbreviated attention spans. The rush of chapters has the effect not of building an argument but of recapitulating it. The book also reflects our equivocal stance toward the technologies that make us feel rushed; Gleick oscillates between veiled Luddism and ooh-cool technophilia, leaving us with the same questions with which we started. His insights and solid research, however, make Faster fascinating. Speed-read it today. Ian Gillingham   Beethoven's Hair by Russell Martin (Broadway Books, 276 pages, $24.95)     Paintings of Ludwig van Beethoven almost invariably portray the brilliant composer as the victim of a perpetual bad-hair day, with brown and gray tresses flaming outward in all directions. When Beethoven died in 1827, however, this riotous mane was almost completely shorn away by souvenir hunters. One of these admirers was 15-year-old Ferdinand Hiller, an aspiring German musician who would follow in Beethoven's footsteps to become a Romantic composer in his own right, all the while carrying the master's clippings. Russell Martin traces the unlikely odyssey of this peripatetic lock of Beethoven's hair through Hiller's Jewish descendants to a small-town doctor in Nazi-occupied Denmark to a Sotheby's auction block in London, where it would be purchased by two American Beethoven enthusiasts in 1994. Interweaving his tale with strands from Beethoven's life, Martin recounts the hair-raising escape of more than a thousand Jews from Gilleleje, Denmark, where one of the refugees apparently handed off the precious heirloom to the town's doctor in gratitude for medical services rendered. Equally breathtaking are the results of forensic tests conducted on Beethoven's hair once it reached the United States. The tests reveal that Beethoven must have declined morphine in the final, excruciating months of his life, probably to keep a clear head for composing, and almost certainly did not suffer from syphilis as some historians once suspected. Instead, Martin reports the surprising discovery of another medical condition to explain the host of maladies that afflicted Beethoven in his later years, including the deafness that forced him to compose some of his greatest works in silence. Matt Buckingham