![]() It is considered good form to dispatch all “roadkill” without any lingering sentimentality-although of course the human bodies crushed by speeding cars are generally granted a little more respect. The automobile, our great vehicle of progress, demands its tribute, whether the hapless cats and deer on the road, the houses and neighborhoods swept away for new roads, or the shattered rural idylls. ![]() The fate of these obstructionists is unvarying: the speeding locomotive-or rather, the speeding car-of progress will flatten them. In the American ideology of heedless progress, “roadkill” has also become a label for anything and anyone standing in the way of the relentless march of destiny. ![]() “Roadkill” is the popular American term for the hundreds of millions of animals that fall victim to automobiles every year, their carcasses-large and small, furry or not (in the case of Texas armadillos)-littering the roads, glimpsed by speeding motorists but rarely eliciting even a wince, except when the beast in question is an aromatic skunk. Roadkill: The New Machine Flattens Its Critics does this with equanimity and scholarly aplomb (particularly on the European response to motorization), and for a slender volume, this book has a lot under the hood.”-Tom Vanderbilt, New York Times Book ReviewĪn excerpt from Autophobia Love and Hate in the Automotive Age Brian Ladd “The work of Autophobia is precisely about looking again at what has been said, by whom and for what reason, and why none of the voluminous critiques of the car-by any number of estimable figures-seem to have much mattered. His pessimistic forecast sees increases in automobile use even as energy prices continue to climb.”- Library Journal As such, he writes, we have accepted the dark side of the automobile-pollution, congestion, high energy costs, and accidental loss of life-in exchange for personal mobility. ![]() “Ladd sets his work apart by showing how the car is completely woven into the fabric of our cultural and economic history. But this year-when Americans are suddenly parking their gas guzzlers and lining up for the bus-is the right year to read this book, and to try and figure out what our century-long affair with the car says about us and about our future.”-Bill McKibben “For most of its history, as Brian Ladd points out in this fascinating account, critiquing the automobile has been a useless exercise-it rolled on over all opposition. ![]()
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