Dangerously Sleepy: Overworked Americans and the Cult of Manly Wakefulness Alan Derickson. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.The cover of Dangerously Sleepy shows a frightening picture of a team of seemingly exhausted construction workers taking a nap, positioned in line on a steel beam without any safety devices, high above Manhattan during the building of a skyscraper in 1932. The book's title, however, refers to a broader range of dangers than fatigue (as the picture suggests), which are associated with sleeplessness and drowsiness among workers. For millions of men and women untenable work schedules have been the major factor leading to sleep loss, newly recognized ailments such as shift work sleep disorder, and related diseases and mortalityInfocusing on the fraught historical relationship between sleep and work in America, health and labor historian Alan Derickson sheds light on a fundamental cultural influence that has operated to extend wakeful working time excessively, particularly among men. In the United States, sleep has frequently been framed as an enemy or a weakness, while constant productivity and flexibility have been overvalued at the expense of health and safety. In conflating manliness with lack of sleep, the dangerous realities of exhaustion were minimized and even glamorized. Throughout American history, prominent men have developed and promoted a number of sleepless work habits, each with a variety of attributes, most of which have carried masculine features. In explaining the rags-to-riches formula, business leaders and their admirers repeatedly have commended sleep deprivation as a significant asset in personal strategies of upward mobility. For men at all levels of society, resisting sleep became a challenge and demonstration of masculine strength.The standards of sleepless commitment to work that were established ago under the very different circumstances of the breadwinner-homemaker model have created even more pronounced difficulties for a sizable share of the women who have entered the workforce in large numbers since the mid-twentieth century. While male customs and values of overwork and wakefulness presumed little or no responsibility for household maintenance, employers and domestic partners have seldom made accommodation for employed women's second shift of tasks at home. Although this study focuses on men's overwork and irregular work, it is the author's self-professed aim to help put the plight of working women in contemporary America in historical perspective (x-xi).The first section (Chapters One and Two) of the book traces the broad cultural and political forces that have shaped values and practices related to somnolence. Prominent men, especially celebrity entrepreneurs from Thomas Edison to Donald Trump have aggressively pushed the notion that sleep is not only a waste of valuable time but also a sign of unmanly weakness. The evolution of public policy has mirrored changing views of gender roles, with supposedly weak female employees initially meriting the concern of the state, which led to government intervention, and then joining their male counterparts in the freedom* to work and irregular hours. Accordingly, regulations setting real limits on hours affect only a very small number of occupations whose practitioners are considered to pose a danger to the general public.The second section (Chapters Three to Five) offers in-depth case studies of male-dominated occupations plagued by sleep difficulties. These cases concern particular enduring sites of endemic and extreme deprivation in manufacturing and transportation, where major categories of men have toiled around the clock by necessity. Today, over one-third of employees in these sectors get less than six hours of sleep per day. At the turn of the twentieth century steelworkers had to deal with a weekly rotation from a twelve-hour day shift to a twelve-hour night shift, with the exhausting transition of a twenty-four hour stint called the long turn. …