David Mehegan writes about Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time by Michael Downing, in The Boston Globe:
Downing, a 46-year-old novelist and writing teacher at Tufts University, had never given daylight saving much thought, until one recent October. ”I was turning back my clock,” he said, ”and for the first time in my life, I thought, ‘I have no idea what I’m doing.’ I asked friends: ‘Why do we do it?’ And the more I asked, the more preposterous it seemed — believing that I was actually getting rid of an hour, or adding an hour, to a day.”
He looked into it and, to his delight and amazement, discovered that while ”most people have an immediate answer or two about who did it and why, almost to a person we are wrong.”
More here.