Ginnie's review
Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America by Tom Lutz (Goodreads author!)
I think Tom Luts and Tom Hodgkinson ( How to Be Idle: A Loafer's Manifesto ) were co-joined twins, separated at birth and adopted out to different families to see what would happen. An unrepentant former flower child, now a knowing academic, Lutz does some heavy lifting with his sociological history of goofing off.
Offering historical and current examples of slackers ascendant, the author of course cites Veblen, Tocqueville and Thoreau. He shares the thoughts of Ben Franklin and Sam Johnson, Oscar Wilde and Jack Kerouac. In his pages, we find Deepak Chopra, a maven named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and a gentleman sometimes known as S. Venkateswaran. Lutz puts forth as leaders in the field of indolence famous loafers both fictional (Bartleby, sorrowful Werther, Ferris Bueller) and seemingly real (Anna Nicole Smith, George W. Bush). Along with Marx, Hawthorne, Dreiser, Lewis, the Agrarians, the Beats a...more
Offering historical and current examples of slackers ascendant, the author of course cites Veblen, Tocqueville and Thoreau. He shares the thoughts of Ben Franklin and Sam Johnson, Oscar Wilde and Jack Kerouac. In his pages, we find Deepak Chopra, a maven named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and a gentleman sometimes known as S. Venkateswaran. Lutz puts forth as leaders in the field of indolence famous loafers both fictional (Bartleby, sorrowful Werther, Ferris Bueller) and seemingly real (Anna Nicole Smith, George W. Bush). Along with Marx, Hawthorne, Dreiser, Lewis, the Agrarians, the Beats a...more
