Holiday Gift Books from 2005: Social Studies

Brother, Can You Spare Me Some Time

THE MARCH OF SPARE TIME: The Problem and Promise
of Leisure in the Great Depression
by Susan Currell
University of Pennsylvania Press

I highly recommend this absorbing and revelatory book. Though her subject seems narrow, Currell traces the relationships of prevailing thought that shaped a wide range of policies affecting all of us to this day.

It also seems an odd if not frivolous subject—leisure in the Great Depression? We are used to a different emphasis in books on the 1930s, as in Malcolm Cowley’s sharp and steady memoir, The Dream of the Golden Mountains, which I’ve recently read. The spectre of vast unemployment, drought, malnutrition, incipient revolution and half a million men a year riding boxcars, would seem to make the issue of leisure irrelevant, or even perverse.

But beginning in the late 1920s it was a concern, and not applied to the rich or leisure classes, but to the working class.

MORE ON THIS BOOK AND OTHER RECOMMENDATIONS HERE

You can search for new and used books with the Powells box on this page. If you order anything after linking from here, this site gets a cut. Thanks.