Over the past three decades, our daily lives have changed slowly but dramatically. Boundaries between leisure and work, public space and private space, and home and office have blurred and become permeable. How many of us now work from home, our wireless economy allowing and encouraging us to work 24/7? How many of us talk to our children while scrolling through e-mails on our BlackBerrys? How many of us feel overextended, as we are challenged to play multiple roles - worker, boss, parent, spouse, friend, and client - all in the same instant?
Dalton Conley, social scientist and writer, provides us with an X-ray view of our new social reality. In Elsewhere, U.S.A., Conley connects our daily experience with occasionally overlooked sociological changes: women's increasing participation in the labor force; rising economic inequality generating anxiety among successful professionals; the individualism of the modern era - the belief in self-actualization and expression - being replaced by the need to play different roles in the various realms of one's existence. In this groundbreaking book, Conley offers an essential understanding of how the technological, social, and economic changes that have reshaped our world are also reshaping our individual lives.
"This brilliant new book makes sense of how changes in the ways people work are affecting the ways families work. Conley writes with the grace of a novelist and the insight of a rigorous scholar." - Richard Sennett, author of The Craftsman
Is writing this review work? Or is it leisure? Or maybe, as social scientist Dalton Conley suggests, it's "weisure"--a mixture of both. Conley's clever, neatly organized audiobook is about the disappearance of boundaries--for example, how we have merged our individualism into a Facebook "intravidualism," how we have combined investment and consumption, and how we have blended nonprofit and profit-making enterprises. (So, that's why PBS has so many commercials!) It all leads to the realization that we're so busy (basically, doing nothing) that we don't even realize that our lives are passing us by and that we have ceded our private values to a mass social autism. Christopher Lane brings empathy and a sense of calm to this remarkable sociological study. This is an audiobook that will have listeners questioning their own lives and the motives of the materialistic "value-added" society we've concocted. R.W.S. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine
About the Author
Dalton Conley is University Professor of the Social Sciences and Chair of Sociology at New York University. He also teaches at NYU's Wagner School of Public Service,and he is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His essays have appeared in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Salon, among other publications. His previous books include Honky and The Pecking Order. He lives in New York City
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