ELSEWHERE, U.S.A. How We Got from the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, Blackberry Moms, and Economic Anxiety

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. © AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine [Published: JUNE 2009]