The history of the reduction of work time and the uses and meanings of leisure time in the United States has produced much heated debate: When and why with increased productivity have Americans “chosen” more leisure over more goods? Has free time increased or not in the past half century? Why has increased leisure become so heavily commercialized—and is that a bad thing? In this survey, David George Surdam has attempted to weave through these controversies, drawing on a wide range of secondary sources in an effort to present a balanced account. It is less a history than a précis of historical and economic literature in topical chapters. Surdam, a student of economic historian Robert Fogel, goes beyond his training to identify and summarize the works of many social and cultural historians of leisure. He does not openly do battle with the jeremiads of popular culture or with labor historians in a defense of a rational choice school of economics. Yet, throughout and especially in his epilogue, he argues that time free from wage and domestic work has been a direct product of economic growth (rather than of politics or cultural change) and that a rational choice in the allocation and expenditure of time has resulted in the democratization of leisure that he optimistically believes will extend into the future. He also generally defends commercial leisure as self-evidently democratic and inevitable. As a social and cultural historian who for many years has intermittently studied this topic from very different points of view, I am conscious of the temptation to expect this author to write the book that I would have written. I'll try instead to represent Surdam's intent without hiding my perspective.

Surdam carefully reviews definitions of leisure—opting for a residual definition of free time after wage work, self-maintenance, commuting, sleep, and child care—and is thoughtful in acknowledging measurement inconsistencies (as between the work of Juliet Schor and John Robinson over trends in work time and the problematic governmental data concerning leisure expenditures). Unlike others, he considers the impact of retirement, increased life expectancy, and delayed entry into the workforce. He covers the views of both critics of consumer culture, like Chris Rojek, as well as market advocates, like Ken Roberts; he presents the pros and cons of many subjects—why the reduction of working hours has stagnated since the 1930s, the changing character of work, longevity trends, and issues of domestic work and leisure. Like a referee in a boxing match, Surdam seldom takes sides, especially on cultural or social issues. His reviews of commercialized leisure in the twentieth century—phonographs, theater, amusement parks, radio, movies, television, and cars—are cursory, but succinct, accurate, and sometimes insightful (discussing, for example, the impact of suburbanization on mass leisure). Curiously, he neglects trends since the 1970s: digitalization, the proliferation of entertainment outlets, and the decline of social leisure, for example. His final chapter, on antitrust issues, is well researched and less familiar than other topics covered.

However, Surdam lacks a nuanced overarching argument about twentieth-century trends in work time and leisure. In some places, he seems to write from a stack of books, summarizing one after another, under broad chapter topics; while this approach allows for a fairly comprehensive treatment of topics, it leads to a choppy narrative. Perhaps inevitably, he is often reduced to summarizing a big topic with the reading of one or two books (for example, considering the complex history of vacations with a book on resorts by Cindy Aron). And his habit of presenting a wide range of contradictory evidence—about the causes and extent of women entering the wage market, for example—usually without comment might be frustrating. His chapter on youth and elder leisure is necessarily sketchy, though some might wonder about the pages devoted to comic books rather than to retirement communities, public pools, or playgrounds.

Even more problematic, several important themes in this history are neglected: the impact of political and social movements on the expansion of leisure, and the cultural history of attitudes and behaviors that shaped work, leisure, and consumption. Surdam scarcely mentions the eight-hour movement from the 1880s to 1919 (relying on an important but focused book by Benjamin Hunnicutt to cover a very complex topic), the role of advocates of public and state-sponsored recreation (e.g., parks, pools), and employer resistance to further reductions in work time (below the forty-hour week). He neglects the well-known fact that the work year of Americans is considerably longer than that of Europeans and the need to explain the lack of statutory paid holidays in the United States. He never really considers how the multiplication of consumer needs—through advertising, social emulation, and other cultural and psychological factors—have frustrated early-twentieth-century predictions of a progressive reduction of work time.

Given Surdam's thorough research of sources, I assume these gaps reflect his economic perspective: that the allocation of time and the “choice” of more leisure time or more income from hours of work are matters of individual maximization of utility—for example, in choosing wage work over leisure when hourly earnings increase. Rising wages then explain why the apparent demand for increased free time has declined in recent years. He assumes that work and leisure time are consumer choices (usually favoring higher income over more free time), thus underestimating how they are also determined by asymmetrical employment relations, law, and ultimately culture, which also, at least equally, may explain this stagnation in work-time reduction. These questions aside, there is a lot here and I hope that the book is read by many.