Elsewhere, U.S.A

Zusatztext 77471106 Informationen zum Autor Dalton Conley Klappentext Over the past three decades! our daily lives have changed slowly but dramatically. Boundaries between leisure and work! public space and private space! and home and office have blurred and become permeable. In Elsewhere! U.S.A.! acclaimed sociologist Dalton Conley connects our day-to-day experiences with occasionally overlooked sociological changes! from women's increasing participation in the labor force to rising economic inequality among successful professionals. In doing so! he provides us with an X-ray view of our new social reality. Preface A TALE OF THREE GENERATIONS My maternal grandparents were married for more than fifty years. He was the town dentist of Carbondale, Pennsylvania, and she was his homemaker partner. As a professional couple in a mostly working-class, coal-mining community, they enjoyed a rich social life. They played bridge on the weekends, going so far as to compete in the statewide circuit of tournaments. They also played golf a couple times a weeksharing a drink with their professional friends afterward as they swapped jokes about Jesus and Moses playing the water hole. With some occasional substitutions, they always seemed to tee up with the same couples: another dentist and his wife, a doctor and his wife, and the owner of the local Ford dealership and his wife. None of these college-educated women worked, though many of them appeared (to me at least) to be a notch or two brighter than their husbands. As my grandmother put it: Grandpa is in charge of the outside, and I am in charge of the inside. She meant that he took care of mowing the lawn and weeding their vegetable garden, while she was responsible for keeping house and entertaining. But I never thought such an arrangement was quite fair, since I saw the inside to be the 1,200-square-foot house and the outside to stretch to the ends of the known universe. But the system seemedfrom outward appearancesto work. Roles and authority were never questioned. And no one ever raised a voice in their home; in fact, still today, if I need to conjure up a calming, peaceful image, I think of sitting in a rocking chair on their porch, talking about my summer plans. Of course, I remember their lives through the idealized glasses of a child. But there are some basic facts that cannot be disputed. For example, though my grandfather enjoyed his work, he saved and invested his money as best he could so that he could retire early. And retire early he didby his midfifties the only teeth he pulled were those of my sister and me when we went for our annual checkup in his Depression-era basement chair. Work was simply something you did and hopefully enjoyed, but it was something you strove to leave behind as soon as you were financially able to lead the good life. For them, the good life entailed paid off mortgages, kids through college, and a condo in Florida where they could spend the winter months and play golf more than twice a week. Perhaps, then, it is fitting (or even ironic) that my grandfather, who lived to a ripe age of eighty-one, died thanks to his favorite leisure activity. While playing golf in Florida in 1989, his friend lost control of the motorized golf cart and ran him over. A few days later, he died of heart failure. Perhaps the absurdity of the accident sparked my grandmother's irrepressible humor. But for the fifteen years afterward that she lived on, she would remark that perhaps it was best that he died the way he did. He always said he wanted to die on a golf course after hitting a hole in one, she would say, perhaps unaware of the renowned scene from the film Caddyshack, which depicted just that. He'll have to settle for par. The real reason it was all for the best, she'd add in a more serious tone, was that his health was beginning to fail him anywayand it's better, she'd arg...

ldquo;Fascinating. . . . Admirably frank. . . . Conley is a master chronicler of our attention-challenged age, tallying up the social and personal costs of always striving to be somewhere else.”
—Time
 
“Conley brings a familiar analysis up-to-date and makes it engagingly fresh with sharp observations and lucid, concise prose.”
—Wall Street Journal
 
“Lively. . . . Intriguing. . . . A compact guidebook to our nervous new world. . . . “Usefully summarizes all sorts of far-flung academic research while repurposing the latest pop-sociological idea entrepreneurship, from Chris Anderson’s ‘long tail’ to Richard Florida’s ‘creative class.’”
—The New York Times Book Review
 
“A fresh, provocative, sometimes disturbing, mostly dispassionate take on why apparently successful knowledge workers are suffering from that early-industrial-era condition Karl Marx called alienation.”
—BusinessWeek
 
“Ambitious. . . . [A] sharp, engagingly composed study of the multiple kinds of fragmentation that torment the American self in the post-everything information age. . . . Conley brings an astutely conditioned—and suitably jaundiced—eye to the task of tracking the permanently distracted self through its new placeless habitat.”
—Tom Vanderbilt, BookForum
 
“Conley is a debunker. . . . [He] connects the dots in new ways and brings in research that may contradict what readers think they know.”
—Forbes
 
“This brilliant new book makes sense of how changes in the ways people work are affecting the ways families work. Conley writes with the grace of a novelist and the insight of a rigorous scholar.”
—Richard Sennett, author of The Craftsman
 
“Convincing. . . . Intelligent. . . . This book was written before the dawning of the neo-Depression now deepening around us, and may of its insights feel more ominous now.”
—Seattle Times
 
“Compelling. . . . A measured mix of social science, first-person reporting and historical research.”
—Newsday
 
“Put down your iPhones and BlackBerrys, dear friends, long enough to read this important book about America’s new ‘elsewhere society,’ where round-the-clock connectivity and multitasking are reshaping the most basic patterns of work, family, and values. Your guide to this brave new world is Dalton Conley, one of America’s most brilliant and perspective social commentators and scholars, and an excellent and entertaining writer as well. No other book compares in describing and explaining the texture of modern lives in a hypernetworked and hypermarketized world. Conley’s insights might just help to rescue the ‘priceless’ from the credit card ads and restore it to work, family, friends, and identity, all of which are under siege in our elsewhere society.”
—Jeffrey D. Sachs, author of The End of Poverty
 
“A sobering and fearlessly honest account of our lives, of your life. . . . A must-read.”
—Sacramento Book Review
 
“Conley is spot-on in his analysis of our hyperconnected world. In these days of BlackBerry ubiquity, it’s useful to have an experienced guide to help make sense of it all—and maybe convince us to unplug once in a while.”
—St. Petersburg Times
 
“Scintillating. . . . Always compelling. . . . Conjure[s] useful talking points on some of the most salient social dynamics of our time.”
—The Wichita Eagle
 
“Brilliant and, at times, chilling. . . . A sociological mirror, this book is equal parts cautionary tale, exercise in contemporary anthropology and a spiritual and emotional audit of the 21st century American.”
—Publishers Weekly
 
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