Healy's book on chronic boredom/ennui is a essential reading for anybody interested in late twentieth century maladies of the psyche/soul. Coming from a more or less modernist perspective on the topic the text fits nicely alongside Reinhard Kuhn's monumental work The Demon of Noontide: Ennui in Western Literature, and also besides Orrin Klapp's Overload and Boredom. More recently Patricia Spacks has given the subject a much needed female perspective. Healy's linking of chronic ennui to modernity and the loss of meaning is convincing as is his charge that 'superboredom' is one of the great maladies of our time. 'Boredom' he tells us 'is a concept with a history ...' Anybody interested in an overview on the modern world's 'maladies of the subject' and the way in which modern and postmodern social structures impinge upon the life world's of individuals must read this work.