Despite a post-adolescent past that included a slew of odd jobs, some commune-style farm living, and plenty of Mary Jane, Tom Lutz was surprised, 30 years later, to find himself beet-red with anger at the sight of his own son, Cody, whiling away his time between high school and college by lolling on the couch. Of course, after Lutz's hippie, halcyon days, he managed to get his bachelor's degree, and also a master's and PhD from Stanford. The intensity of his fatherly frustrations got him thinking.

In Doing Nothing, Lutz takes a look at some of the most famous good-for-nothings in popular culture, emblems of a lifestyle that we aspire to and also revile. The study starts early in American history with Benjamin Franklin, whose famously thrifty, regulated work ethic (the goal being to get, rather than spend) became stamped on the American psyche. The flip side of that coin was the early slacker ethos of Samuel Johnson and Henry Mackenzie (happiness comes from the spending, not the getting).

Lutz shows us patterns in how Americans perceive their employment — viewpoints that resonate, combine, and transform over time. Lutz cites articles and ads from the 1920s (one, in particular, from Ladies' Home Journal ), suggesting that the job of the modern woman was to shop wisely for the household — recasting spending as fulfilling and hard work. In the '90s, offices came to resemble lounge-friendly video arcades as much as places of business. So, too, does history change our understanding of joblessness: in the roaring '20s, popular attitudes toward slacking were, of course, very different than they soon became during the Great Depression.

What we see, though, is an American love affair with rebellion, with figures as unalike as Henry David Thoreau, Jack Kerouac, and George W. Bush going (in the famous words of a young, inebriated Dubya to his father) mano a mano with the value system of their elders. If the American Dream is to do what we want, when we want, how we want, it is also, should we choose, to reject even that. And do nothing at all.

-Stephen Dougherty