| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Cindy S. Aron. Working at Play: A History of Vacations in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press. 1999. Pp. xi, 324. $35.00.

Orvar Löfgren. On Holiday: A History of Vacationing. (California Studies in Critical Human Geography, number 6.) Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 1999. Pp. xiv, 320. $29.95.

Both these histories of vacationing in Western cultures organize their argument around a polar tension. In Cindy S. Aron's book, the tension is between two views of leisure, seen negatively as idleness or positively as re-creation, in the literal sense of restoring bodily and mental health. Fears of leisure were not simply paternalist concerns of the middle class projected onto the working class. For middle-class Americans as well, it remained a central struggle to reconcile their need and desire for extended periods of rest and recreation with their commitment to work. The work ethic, or the gospel of work, shaped by both Puritan and republican doctrines, dominated the nineteenth-century social and intellectual landscape in the United States. 1

Orvar Löfgren places a different tension at the center of his analysis, a tension between two vacationing attitudes, embodied respectively by the fictional characters Phileas Fogg and Robinson Crusoe. The polarity is borrowed from French sociologist Jean-Didier Urbain and opposes the male and middle-class model of Fogg, "the ardent and hurried traveler in search of new sights," to the "Robinsonian desire 'to get away from it all'" (p. 9). This time the polarity has a class ring to it and serves in a discourse of moral and aesthetic distinction, elevating the "true traveler," the Foggs of this world, over the turistus vulgaris caught in the fake world of prefabricated experience and the package tour. Löfgren wishes to move beyond such "tired stereotypes" (p. 8) and to restore the moral and aesthetic neutrality of his polar pair of travelers, stressing the uniqueness of all personal travel experiences. . . .

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