Every day we eat, walk, make use of our skills, meet or talk with our friends, and fall into the inevitable habits that eventually become important elements in making us what we are. The thirteen highly personal essays composing this volume anatomize the elements of our lives, with stress on the cultures of the industrialized West. Sociologists, historians, writers, and the general reader will all emerge refreshed from this excursion into the hidden mysteries of that most obvious of conditions – daily life.