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The myth of the open road and the reality of the American driving experience is explored by John A. Jakle and Keith A. Sculle in their new book, “Motoring: The Highway Experience in America” (The University of Georgia Press/2008).
“Motoring” unmasks the forces that shape the American driving experience – commercial, aesthetic, cultural, mechanical – as it takes a timely look back at Americans’ historically unconditional love of motor travel. Focusing on recreational travel between 1900 and 1960, the book covers dozens of topics related to drivers, cars and highways and explains how they all converge to uphold that illusory notion of release and rejuvenation called the “open road.”
Jakle, a professor emeritus of geography and of landscape architecture at the UI, and Sculle, head of research and education at the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, have collaborated on five previous books on the history, culture and landscape of the American road. Here, with an emphasis on the driver’s perspective, they discuss garages and gas stations, roadside tourist attractions, freeways and toll roads, truck stops, bus travel and the rise of the convenience store while making readers think about aspects of driving that are often taken for granted. Although driving originally celebrated freedom and touted a common experience, it has increasingly become a highly regulated, isolated activity. The motive behind America’s first embrace of the automobile – individual prerogative – still substantially obscures this reality.
“Americans did not have the automobile imposed on them,” say the authors, who ask why some of the early prophetic warnings about American car culture went unheeded and why the arguments of its promoters resonated so persuasively. Today, the automobile is implicated in any number of environmental and social problems. As the wisdom of our dependence on automobile travel has come into serious question, reassessment of how we first became that way is more important than ever, they write.
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