Download Autophobia: Love and Hate in the Automotive Age AudioBook Free
Cars are the scourge of civilization, responsible for from suburban sprawl and metropolitan decay to environmental devastation and rampant local climate change, not to mention our slavish reliance on foreign oil from dubious options overseas. Add the amazing price in individuals lives that people purchase our automobility, some 30 million people were killed in automobile accidents during the 20th century in addition to the countless quantity of hours we waste products in gridlock traffic commuting to work, jogging errands, picking right up our children, and searching for parking, and one can't help but ask: Havent we'd enough already? After a hundred years when driving, could we be achieving the end of the automotive age?From the Model T to the SUV, Autophobia shows that our vexed marriage with the auto is nothing new. In fact, debates over whether autos are makes of good or evil inside our world have raged for over a hundred years now, since the auto was invented. Corresponding to Brian Ladd, this love and hate marriage we tell our autos is the determining quality of the automotive time. And everyone has an judgment about them, from the industry shills, oil barons, and radical libertarians who offer autos blithe paeans and refuse their ill effects, to the technophobes, treehuggers, and killjoys who curse autos, ignoring the real freedoms and benefits they offer us. Focusing in particular on our worlds metropolitan areas, and spanning configurations as assorted as belle epoque Paris, Nazi Germany, postwar London, LA, NY, and the smoggy Shanghai of today, Ladd explores this love and hate marriage throughout, acknowledging adherents and detractors of the auto alike.Eisenhower, Hitler, Jan and Dean, J. G. Ballard, Ralph Nader, OPEC, and, of course, autos, all come into play in this wide-ranging but remarkably wry and pithy e book. A dazzling display of erudition, Autophobia is cultural commentary at its most persuasive, history at its most searching and a shocking page-turner.
