In Dangerously Sleepy, Derickson provides a guide to decades of insufficient sleep among American men across three industries—steel, railroads, and long-haul trucking. Although certain notable elite males—including Thomas Edison and Charles Lindbergh—highlighted in the first chapter were promoters of their own superiority as short sleepers, working-class men have at best been kidnapped into this “cult of manly wakefulness.” In comprehensive and exhaustively referenced chapters drawing from a broad range of sources—conference and convention minutes, hearing transcripts, judicial opinions, government reports, union records, books and memoirs, and even a vintage movie—Derickson repeatedly demonstrates that when no risks to the public health could be claimed, concern for the health and safety of individual workers was dismissed.
Steel workers and Pullman porters were completely at the mercy of the work hours and sleep conditions that management mandated for them, and independent truckers were pushed by economic realities to stretch well beyond safe...