Outstanding Academic Titles 2024: Leisure Time

Enjoy this week's Outstanding Academic Titles list snippet: Five titles pertaining to Leisure Time

Posted on May 15, 2025 in Outstanding Academic Titles

Enjoy these five selections from the Choice Reviews 2024 Outstanding Academic Titles list. This week, we highlight Outstanding Academic Titles focused on leisure time. A hearty congratulations to the winning authors, editors, and publishers!

1. Free time: the history of an elusive ideal
Cross, Gary S. New York University, 2024

Armed with a pleasant narrative style, a deeply historical perspective, and 45 pages of notes, Cross (emer., history, Pennsylvania State Univ.) offers a masterful account and analysis of chiefly American and British attitudes and practices around the use of time and how these peoples have arrived at their varied, but similar, patterns of work time and free time. The volume begins with a brief description of several approaches to evaluating terminologies and of the narrowness of recent efforts to understand and resolve the discontents and uncertainties of today’s Westerners about their lives. Cross then dives into early modern centuries and their “slow culture” ways of life, and surfaces at the break point of capital’s creation of the Industrial Revolution and the sociopathic pursuit of profits that has persisted since then. Cross does not move very far Left in suggesting approaches to curing the malady. He suspects that capitalism will preside over such efforts for the foreseeable future in the West, and he declines to set forth an imagined system of his own. View on Amazon

2. From perception to pleasure: the neuroscience of music and why we love it
Zatorre, Robert J. Oxford, 2023

This volume may appear slim, but it embodies an extraordinary achievement. Zatorre (McGill Univ., Canada) is a neuroscientist who, for most of his career, has studied how the brain processes music and other auditory information. He has written scores of scientific articles on music and the brain and many chapters on how the brain processes music. His studies are deeply informative and often incredibly clever. He is a researcher with a capacious knowledge of literature and music. While remaining steadfastly true to the ideals of science, he writes with a poet’s gift for turning the results of complex empirical studies of the brain into graceful prose accessible to scientists and laypeople alike. The book is a brilliant and illuminating journey through the various layers of music processing in the brain from the first milliseconds of perception to the endless joys of musical pleasure. Moving effortlessly among the various levels of organization and analysis of the brain/mind, from description to mechanisms, Zatorre lays out the empirical evidence for particular aspects of how the brain processes music and uses that evidence to construct brilliant deductions and suggestions for future research.  View on Amazon

3. What are museums for?
Sleigh, Jon. Bristol University Press, 2024

In this short, easy-to-read tome, Sleigh (an independent arts and heritage Learning Curator) explores the paradigmatic shift happening in museums worldwide as they respond to the recent cultural mandate to overhaul the status quo to prioritize centering inclusion, fostering trust with all members of the public, prioritizing accessibility, and other forward-looking practices. In each of the book’s seven main chapters, the story of a museum object illustrates the concept at the heart of each discussion. Through conversations with museum leaders, Sleigh delves into the responsibilities and ideals of today’s museums, revealing both sincere personal perspectives and expert insights into challenging topics. At the heart of the overall narrative is consistent advocacy for the redistribution of power in cultural institutions to radically center inclusion in all areas of museum practice. A quick, informative resource for readers seeking an overview of the key concerns facing museums as they begin to evolve into the accountable, representative, inclusive institutions they are called on to be. View on Amazon

4. Ballyhoo!: the roughhousers, con artists, and wildmen who invented professional wrestling
Langmead, Jon. Missouri, 2024

Jon Langmead’s Ballyhoo! examines professional wrestling’s origins in the late 19th and early 20th centuries within a cultural milieu of carnivals, con artists, criminality, hucksters, and anyone who fooled, swindled, or cheated people to make money. Langmead argues that when wrestling became “worked” (choreographed), it became more popular and mainstream. However, professional wrestling never shed its huckster and carnival past because it was compelled to preserve the most important trade secrets of the industry’s worked performances. Promoter Jack Curley is featured as the influential figure who created the first forms of worked wrestling. The business created several economic cartels run by strongman promoters who increasingly competed for markets, talent, and the benefit of promoting the world heavyweight champion. The author points out that wrestling became “real” when worked contests became shoot (legitimate) fights over which promoters would get the booking rights to the world heavyweight champion. The infamous “double-cross” came into wrestling parlance when worked matches became legitimate fights. Ballyhoo! outlines the beginnings of staples in modern wrestling, including the advent of baby faces (good wrestlers) and heels (bad wrestlers), personal story lines, and the role of women wrestlers in a hyper-masculine business.  View on Amazon.

5. Never not working: why the always-on culture is bad for business, and how to fix it
Clark, Malissa. Harvard Business Review Press, 2024

Clark (organizational psychology, Univ. of Georgia) analyzes the phenomenon of workaholism, with a particular focus on workaholism’s negative effects on companies, universities, and other work settings. Based in part on numerous interviews, she defines and describes workaholism, starting with its manifestations in individual workers. Unlike many other books on this subject and the related problem of burnout, this one stresses the deleterious effects of employee workaholism on the workplace, an approach intended to motivate employers to make needed changes. In Clark’s view, addressing workaholism on the individual level is a necessary but insufficient approach to this pervasive problem. In addition to quantitative data, Clark supports her argument with many personal anecdotes from her interviewees, particularly members of Workaholics Anonymous. She argues that “the research conclusively strikes down the myth that workaholism is a good thing—for individuals, for their families, and in particular, for their organizations.” View on Amazon.

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