A Time for Every Purpose: Law and the Balance of Life

In this cogent and insightful book, Rakoff uses the law's treatment of time to illuminate how we organize our lives, and the sort of choices we make without even knowing we're making them: how things we assume are fixed are the product of social choices, which can be changed; how the usual explanations for such apparently inevitable ripples in the rhythms of life as time zones or the school year are artifacts of particular times and particular issues in American life. It's a liberating book.

This study of the interaction between society and the regulation of time is thoughtful, reflective, engaging, well-paced, compelling, stimulating, and persuasive. It is a work of political economy in the classic, grand sense, and integrates the disciplines of law, sociology, psychology, and economics. Understanding that leisure can be more than a residual category creates the potential for profound change in the workplace and home.