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The Car: The Rise and Fall of the Machine that Made the Modern World
Maybe someday
37
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
22/100Critics
53/100Scholars
Author:
Bryan Appleyard
Publisher:
Pegasus Books
Date:
September 6, 2022
More than any other technology, cars have transformed American popular culture. Cars have created vast wealth as well as novel dreams of freedom and mobility. They have transformed our sense of distance and made the world infinitely more available to our eyes and our imaginations. They have inspired cinema, music and literature; they have, by their need for roads, bridges, filling stations, huge factories and global supply chains, re-engineered the world. Almost everything we now need, want, imagine or aspire to assumes the existence of cars in all their limitless power and their complex systems of meanings. As the age of the car as we know it comes to an end, Bryan Appleyard's book tells the story of the rise and fall of the incredible machine that made the modern world what it is today.
What The Reviewers Say
Compelling.
At its best, Appleyard’s book stimulates exactly the feeling of being driven by a reckless but charismatic driver. Just as a wild drive is fun until the brakes come on, it is only when you put the book down that you notice the moments that it occasionally careens into bathos.
This book is very much in that familiar voice: forward-looking but sceptical, gnomic but penetrating. It also has excellent anecdotes.
The bulk of the book focuses on these grand themes of change, speckled with pithy tidbits of automotive and engineering history.
