Review: Breaktime

Title: Breaktime: Living Without Work in a Nine to Five World

Author: Bernard Lefkowitz

Genre: Journalism

Trigger Warnings: Death (mentions), mental illness (mentions), illness (mentions)

Back Cover:

A revolution against conventional work and career is spreading across America. It’s a quiet movement, but sooner or later it may affect you. This dramatic revolt against against the work ethic has led many Americans to break with their careers and to restructure their lives around their personal design.

In the past ten years, many Americans have dropped out of the job market in significant numbers, choosing not to work. These people are rethinking their priorities and are rejecting the pressures that come with climbing the success ladder. These are not the idle rich or the romantic young, but ordinary middle-class citizens who want to make the most of themselves, to live for the present rather than for the future. A social security pension at sixty-five is no longer their goal in life – these men and women will not allow the nine-to-fine routine to interfere with their desires for personal satisfaction.

Bernard Lefkowitz who has talked and lived with people of all ages, income levels, and life-styles, offers a fascinating portrait of the nonworking life. Why have these people stopped working? How do they pay the rent? What do they do with all their time? What options are available to those of us who might also choose to retire early – as early as twenty-five? More than one hundred people have confronted these and other vital issues in interviews with Lefkowitz.

Among the subjects presented in Breaktime are a couple who sublet their apartment and house-sit for others; a loan collector who found that he was more interested in people than in chasing debtors; an ex-TV anchorman who’d had it with corporate journalism; and a former Xerox executive who plotted and planned for his ten years with the company to leave at thirty-two and do nothing for the rest of his life. These and many others have quit early and are enjoying life on their own terms. Breaktime is a revelation and an incentive to find a better way.

Review:

I spent a remarkable amount of time trying to track down this book considering I didn’t know very much about it. I knew the title, and there was a photograph of the paperback cover available on Goodreads and The StoryGraph. (It’s actually the cover image I used on this post, since the copy I finally got my hands on was a hardcover without the dust jacket and therefore was just plain pressboard.) I couldn’t find a description or anything regarding what it was about, and I couldn’t track down any reviews. It probably has something to do with the book being a not-particularly-noteworthy longform journalism piece published in 1979, but even the few places on the internet that acknowledged the book’s existence didn’t seem to care to do more than that.

I eventually located in my local library’s storage archives and had to go request a librarian go into the archives and grab it for me. But in the end, I did get my hands on it. (And I added the back cover information to The StoryGraph, because the part from the dust cover was pasted inside the book itself and I don’t think it’s actually online anywhere else.) Which seems like a lot of effort for something that, again, I knew next to nothing about. But the title caught my interest, and even though I knew I was unlikely to find anything particularly actionable in a book about people opting out of work in the 1970s, I still wanted to read it.

The 1970s was nearly fifty years ago, so this book felt less like a current events analysis (which I’m sure it was supposed to be) and more of a capture of attitudes of a particular subset of people in a particular time. One of the things I found most fascinating about it, though, was how many beliefs and attitudes were exactly the same as today. Nobody wants to work anymore; people aren’t religious anymore; the government is full of liberals who want to destroy us conservatives; your job is your identity; maybe your job shouldn’t be your identity; these are all familiar ideas expressed at one point or another in this book. Even though economics have changed, societal beliefs about women working have changed, and ideas about the very meaning of work itself have changed, a lot of the attitudes Bernard and his subjects express haven’t.

Another thing that struck me about this book is how un-feasible most of the subjects’ strategies would be in today’s world. One person managed to get unemployment for seven years; several had their formerly stay-at-home wives go to work and support the family on a clerical salary; a remarkable number of them got their employers to say they were laid off so they could get unemployment in the first place. And that’s not counting the ones who were fairly wealthy to begin with and chose to just live on their savings. All of them put a big emphasis on cutting down their expenses, but I can’t help noticing all the ways none of this would work in 2024.

And, interestingly, it seemed that a lot of them didn’t work in the 1970s, either. A majority of the 100 people Bernard talked to for this book ended up going back to work. Many of them talked about the stress of cobbling together money to pay bills. At least one went to eviction court, and several more were close to it when Bernard’s research ended. A few got severely depressed by losing the sense of purpose and accomplishment that working and being the primary breadwinner gave them, and several talked about not really knowing what to do with their time now that it wasn’t going towards work. There’s a strange tension in this book between these people’s desire not to work, to be free from the job and the boss and the alarm clock and spending a bunch of their time doing things they hate or ethically disagree with or just aren’t the things they want to be spending their time on, and the fact that “living without work in a nine to five world” doesn’t seem to be feasible for more than a few years at a time. And the book never actually explores this tension. It covers people who are voluntarily not working with a sense of “I don’t really understand this but it’s the future of work,” but it also never seems to draw the connection that even for these people, it’s not really possible. To be fair, it is possible in some cases – if they already had a ton of savings to live on, if they were close to retirement age and had enough savings to live on until they could start getting social security or their pension, or if they had a spouse who was willing and able to go to work and who could earn enough to support their family. But those are all true today, as well. These people opting out of work hadn’t really found a way to opt out of work entirely. In most cases, it was something more akin to an extended vacation or sabbatical than dropping out of the nine-to-five world. But the book doesn’t acknowledge this. It presents voluntary unemployment and early retirement as the future while never seeming to notice that even most of the people already doing it couldn’t make it permanent.

There’s a point to be made about society’s view on work and how even though technology and automation has brought down the amount we really need to work, societal values have gone the opposite way than what Bernard predicted. Instead of normalizing early retirement and moving towards twenty-hour workweeks, we’ve made working into a moral and ethical good and busyness into a proof of your personal worth. It would be interesting to contrast this movement with today’s FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) movement, which has the same goal but aims to do it by becoming independently wealthy instead of by relying on social support systems. I would also be curious to hear from someone who lived through the 1970s about this book and how it matches up with the values, culture, and societal dynamics of the period. I’m especially interested to hear if the idea of living without work was a more mainstream idea at the time or if Bernard was reporting on an obscure hippie-adjacent subculture he was interested in. I can point out a bunch of things that were really interesting about this book and how it contrasts with attitudes about work in 2024, but my lack of context and historical understanding about this era limits what more I can get from it. As I anticipated, it’s most definitely not an instruction manual for how to quit your job and keep living afterwards in the modern day (or even at the time it was written). But despite that, it was extremely interesting, and I’m glad I took the time and effort to hunt it down.

Review: Show Dog

Title: Show Dog: The Charmed Life and Trying Times of a Near-Perfect Purebred

Author: Josh Dean

Genre: Journalism

Trigger Warnings: Rape (mentions), excrement, animal death (mentions)

Back Cover:

Journalist Josh Dean tells the story of a loveable Australian Shepherd, Jack, on his novice tour through the exciting world of professional dog showing, following Jack from his first competitions in local school gymnasiums all the way to the great granddaddy of them all, the Westminster Dog Show. A veteran journalist, Dean shines a warm, steady light on the trials that Jack and his plucky, dedicated owners come to face, and uses their story to explore the larger histories of dog shows themselves; the fascinating and sometimes bizarre history of purebred dogs; and our complex, heartfelt relationships to the pets we grow to love. For dog lovers, readers of Marley & Me, Merle’s Door, and Oogy, and fans of Best in Show, Dean’s Show Dog is an irresistible instant classic.

Review:

This was another recommendation from my mother-in-law. We watched the most recent Westminster dog show together and I made an offhand comment about showing Newfoundland dogs, and she suggested this book. My library had it on audiobook, so I figured, what the heck.

I generally enjoy long-form journalism and have read a few books that are essentially journalism long enough to make a book, and those one is not like those. Josh himself is barely in the book. There’s no discussion of why he was interested in dog shows or how he found Jack and his owner Kimberly or why the agreed to be part of his book. The other people in the book only interact with him a few times, and he only does anything besides watching and talking to people once. It was easy to forget this was all being observed by a journalist and often felt more like I was reading a story about these characters and their dogs.

It almost felt like Josh was trying to keep himself out of the story, which is the opposite of every long-form journalism piece I’ve read. It made the book feel less authoritative, less like a well-researched piece of journalism and more like a based-on-a-true-story tale with some facts about dogs for flavor. It also limited my engagement since I didn’t have the author as a reader avatar to follow and relate with.

That said, it was an interesting book. I learned some things about dog shows and their history, and quite a bit about Australian Shepherds in particular. The main point seemed to be “it’s harder than it looks and it’s expensive so think carefully before you get into showing dogs.” But it did tell a story that was engaging enough, and I think it did give a good behind-the-scenes look at dog showing for people who’ve never done more than watch the Westminster show on TV. It’s most definitely not a stellar example of the journalistic art, but it was a perfectly acceptable reading experience.

Review: An Ordinary Age (DNF)

Title: An Ordinary Age: Finding Your Way in a World That Expects Exceptional

Author: Rainesford Stauffer

Genre: Journalism

Trigger Warnings: None

Read To: 37%

Back Cover:

Young adulthood: the time of our lives when, theoretically, anything can happen, and the pressure is on to make sure everything does. Social media has long been the scapegoat for a generation of unhappy young people, but perhaps the forces working beneath us–wage stagnation, student debt, perfectionism, and inflated costs of living–have a larger, more detrimental impact on the world we post to our feeds.

An Ordinary Age puts young adults at the center as Rainesford Stauffer examines our obsessive need to live and post our #bestlife, and the culture that has defined that life on narrow, and often unattainable, terms. From the now required slate of (often unpaid) internships, to the loneliness epidemic, to the stress of finding yourself through school, work, and hobbies–the world is demanding more of young people these days than ever before. And worse, it’s leaving little room for young people to ask the big questions about who they want to be, and what makes a life feel meaningful.

Perhaps we’re losing sight of the things that fulfill us: strong relationships, real roots in a community, and the ability to question how we want our lives to look and feel, even when that’s different from what we see on the ‘Gram. Stauffer makes the case that many of our most formative young adult moments are the ordinary ones: finding our people and sticking with them, learning to care for ourselves on our own terms, and figuring out who we are when the other stuff–the GPAs, job titles, the filters–fall away.

Review:

I’m a twenty-something who has been told my whole life that my twenties are supposed to be great, I’m supposed to travel and have great experiences and move around a lot and try new things and date interesting people and find my dream job in my dream career. I was also a Gifted Child growing up, so I was expected growing up to be personally exceptional as well. But lately I’ve been realizing that I don’t want all of that – I don’t want to travel much, I’m tired of moving and want to stay somewhere permanently, I don’t have a “dream job” because I don’t dream of working. I was hoping that this book was an instruction manual for being ordinary in a world that expects exceptional, or at least a persmission slip to only want to be ordinary.

In short, I thought this was going to be a book for me, one of the people talked about on the back cover.

Instead, it was kind of a mess. In some ways it read more like a defence of Millennials to the Gen X-ers and Boomers who think young people are just ungrateful/spoiled/got too many participation trophies/etc. Rainesford says that this book isn’t specifically about any particular generation, just about young people in general, but it reminds me of many of the defences of Millennials that I’ve read on the internet over the years.

At the same time it was simultaneously trying to give young people that permission slip I had hoped for. It wanted to be both a book about young people to help older people understand them and a book for young people to help them accept that they don’t have to do everything expected of them in their twenties, like it’s trying to both defend young people to older generations and comfort the young people themselves. The book felt unfocused and pointless, and so I didn’t feel like there was any point in me finishing it.

Review: Going Clear

Title: Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

Author: Lawrence Wright

Genre: Journalism/Religion

Trigger Warnings: Physical abuse, mental abuse, emotional abuse, abuse of children, neglect of children, unreality, homophobia, imprisonment/confinement, starvation, emotional manipulation, death, suicide, suicidal ideation, rape (mention), torture, infidelity, mental illness

Back Cover:

Based on more than two hundred personal interviews with both current and former Scientologists and years of archival research, Lawrence Wright uses his extraordinary investigative skills to uncover for us the inner workings of the Church of Scientology: its origins in the imagination of science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard; its struggles to find acceptance as a legitimate (and legally acknowledged) religion; its vast, secret campaign to infiltrate the U.S. government; and its dramatic efforts to grow and prevail after the death of Hubbard.

We learn about Scientology’s esoteric cosmology; about the auditing process that determines an inductee’s state of being; about the Bridge to Total Freedom, through which members gain eternal life. We see the ways in which the church pursues celebrities, such as Tom Cruise and John Travolta, and how young idealists who joined the Sea Org, the church’s clergy, whose members often enter as children, signing up with a billion-year contract and working with little pay in poor conditions. We meet men and women “disconnected” from friends and family by the church’s policy of shunning critical voices. And we discover, through many firsthand stories, the violence that has long permeated the inner sanctum of the church.

In Going Clear, Wright examines what fundamentally makes a religion a religion, and whether Scientology is, in fact, deserving of the constitutional protections achieved in its victory over the IRS. Employing all his exceptional journalistic skills of observations, understanding, and synthesis, and his ability to shape a story into a compelling narrative, Lawrence Wright has given us an evenhanded yet keenly incisive book that goes far beyond an immediate exposé and uncovers the very essence of what makes Scientology the institution it is.

Review:

I didn’t know a whole lot about Scientology going into this book. I knew it targeted the rich and famous because it wanted money, it liked solving its problems with lawsuits, a little bit about its attempts to infiltrate the government, and that its belief system involved some completely ridiculous stuff about aliens. That’s about it. This book is thorough and very intense. Anything you want to know about Scientology is here.

It starts with an extremely deep dive into L. Ron Hubbard himself – his family, his military service, and the contrast between what he and Scientology say about him and what non-church sources say – and give a well-researched portrait of the man himself. He may have just been a really good con man whose con got bigger than he planned, but Lawrence Wright shows a man who may very well have been a paranoid schizophrenic who truly believed everything he was teaching through Scientology.

This book is hard to read in many places. It doesn’t shy away from the many awful things done by the church. Anything you told any church member could and would be reported to superiors and held against you. Thought crimes could earn you years in the Rehabilitation Project Force, a program of abuses and forced labor that differed from literal slavery only in that it technically wasn’t against your will. Children taken away from their parents and working ten- or twelve-hour days. A method of treating mental breakdowns involving complete and total isolation that led to at least one death. It’s hard to read straight through due to all the many ways Scientology has hurt so many people.

For me, the most interesting part of the book was learning about Scientology’s cosmology, what the aliens are actually about, and why Scientology needs so much of your money to advance through the ranks. There was some of that in this book, but not as much as I’d expected. Lawrence focuses less on the “woo” bits of belief and cosmology and more on facts – people who actually existed, what they did and what was done to them, discrepancies between the church’s official story and what outside records show. I would have liked to know a little more about Scientology beliefs, but that’s not really what this book is trying to be about. It’s trying to be more of a history.

I learned a lot about Scientology, the people behind it, and the people affected by it from this book. It’s a lot more thorough than is probably necessary for a casual interest (at over 400 pages, it’s highly engaging but definitely more in-depth than passing curiosity would warrant), but if you need a deep dive into Scientology’s history for any reason, this is a fantasic place to start.

Review: Stiff

Title: Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

Author: Mary Roach

Genre: Journalism

Trigger Warnings: Death, gore, blood, corpses, medical procedures, autopsies, dissection, cannibalism

Back Cover:

Stiff is an oddly compelling, often hilarious exploration of the strange lives of our bodies postmortem. For two thousand years, cadavers—some willingly, some unwittingly—have been involved in science’s boldest strides and weirdest undertakings. In this fascinating account, Mary Roach visits the good deeds of cadavers over the centuries and tells the engrossing story of our bodies when we are no longer with them.

Review:

You wouldn’t think a book about dead bodies and the various gross and gory things done to them would be funny. Yet somehow I found myself chuckling out loud at Mary Roach’s humorous phrasing and dry wit.

This book is not for the weak of stomach, as Mary does not shy away from the graphic and gory nature of what happens to dead bodies when they’re used for science. In fact, proclaiming herself curious and not squeamish at all, she provides all of the details. And if you’re not squeamish and are curious about what happened to some bodies in the past or what might happen to you if you donate your body to science, you’ll learn a lot.

Mary talks about how cadavers are used to give surgery practice to future doctors, to ensure vehicle safety measures are safe for actual human bodies, to test military weapons, to assist in solving crimes, and more. There’s a remarkable amount of uses for dead bodies, many of which I never would have considered. It almost made me want to donate my body to science when I die – almost. She also talks about past uses of cadavers in medical study and the history of grave-robbing to supply corpses before “donating your body to science” was a thing you could do.

This book also touches on ethical issues – the extent of informed consent and the consent of the deceased versus their family, treating a body with respect regardless of what it’s used for, and the considerations of donating your body to science when you don’t know if you’ll be used to help a future surgeon learn to save lives or for the military to test the effectiveness of new bullets and might be willing for your body to be used for one but not the other. There’s a large number of ethical issues involved in using dead humans for your research.

This was a really interesting book. Definitely not for the squeamish, and even if you’re not squeamish don’t read it while you’re eating, but I learned a lot about the scientific uses of corpses and found it an entertaining, surprisingly funny read.

Review: Moonwalking with Einstein

Title: Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

Author: Joshua Foer

Genre: Journalism

Trigger Warnings: Alcohol, getting drunk, transphobic phrases

Back Cover:

The blockbuster phenomenon that charts an amazing journey of the mind while revolutionizing our concept of memory.

An instant bestseller that is poised to become a classic, Moonwalking with Einstein recounts Joshua Foer’s yearlong quest to improve his memory under the tutelage of top “mental athletes.” He draws on cutting-edge research, a surprising cultural history of remembering, and venerable tricks of the mentalist’s trade to transform our understanding of human memory. From the United States Memory Championship to deep within the author’s own mind, this is an electrifying work of journalism that reminds us that, in every way that matters, we are the sum of our memories.

Review:

Let’s start off with a clarification: This book is not at all what it’s advertised as. This is not a handbook on how to remember. This is really just a journalistic article about memory competitions that happens to be long enough to be its own book.

Does the book talk about memorization techniques? Yes. But it also devotes equal amount of page time to how memory works, the history of memorization, and Joshua’s friendship with the competitor on the “memory championship circuit” who encouraged him to compete in the United States Memory Championship, as well as some tangents about an inner-city teacher who teaches his high school class to memorize, a prodigy who Joshua doesn’t think is an actual prodigy, and more.

In a sentence, this book is basically the story of Joshua’s journey from knowing nothing about memory to competing in the United States Memory Championship, with a lot of detours in between – so much so that I almost categorized this book as a memoir.

Is it bad? No, not at all. It’s actually pretty interesting as a journalistic work. It has an overarching story (Joshua’s quest to improve his memory and memorize competitively) and a lot of really interesting information about how memory works, how people use memory techinques, and other memory-related topics.

Highlight to read mild spoilers: The funny thing is that all this memory practice Joshua did didn’t really affect his actual working memory for things like where he left his car keys. At the end of the book, he talks about how his working memory hadn’t improved much at all after a year of intense memory training. Sure, he can memorize 52 cards in less than two minutes, but how practical of a skill is that, really?

If you like longform journalistic articles (I do) and go in expecting that out of this book, you’ll probably enjoy it (like I did). The reason this review has such a negative tone is because this book is GROSSLY misadvertised. If you want to actually learn memory techniques like the mind palace, you’ll be disappointed – Moonwalking with Einstein only offers an overview of the techniques. It’s more a story about application than a learning resource. An enjoyable story with interesting tangential information, sure, but still not at all what it’s sold as.