Where the Road and the Sky Collide: America Through the Eyes of Its Drivers - Hardcover

Berger, K. T.

9780805014884: Where the Road and the Sky Collide: America Through the Eyes of Its Drivers

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805014888 ISBN 13: 9780805014884

Publisher: Henry Holt & Co, 1993

Most Americans have surprisingly intimate relationships with their cars. Nearly everyone drives - at least 140 million of us do - and nearly everyone is frustrated to tears by traffic congestion, aware of the political repercussions of driving (didn't we recently fight a war to keep us mobile?), and increasingly concerned about the car's environmental hazards.
"Car biologist" K. T. Berger sets out on an investigative journey to explore just how this dominant life form - part human, part machine - is affecting its vast, complex ecosystem. In an age when ten percent of our arable land and fifty percent of our urban areas are paved over, will the car evolve, or will it continue on its present course of destruction, which can only lead to its extinction (and possibly our own)?
Berger searches for answers as he interviews the nation's drivers in this offbeat, on-the-road adventure. He talks to an extraordinary range of car users - from South Dakota to Florida, from Los Angeles to New York - all with personal tales that illustrate just how deeply cars and driving are ingrained in American life.
In Los Angeles, Berger finds a former street racer who tells hilarious tales of racing around the city in his custom Porsche with a Corvette engine; in Dallas, a good ol' boy police detective talks about relentlessly chasing thieves whose crimes are, by God, "crimes against the great state of Texas!"; and in New York, Berger meets the classic New York cabbie with more one-liners than Rodney Dangerfield.
What are we going to do about the transportation mess? In search of answers to this urgent question, Berger journeys to Detroit to interview automotive executives and engineers. He puts current efforts to reduce gridlock and auto pollution into focus by interviewing urban and regional planners, transportation experts in government and academia, and environmental activists, creating a panoramic and fascinating portrait of America on wheels.

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From Kirkus Reviews:

Berger--who's actually two brothers, journalist Kevin Berger and psychotherapist Todd Berger (coauthors, Zen Driving, 1988-- not reviewed)--explores the ways that Americans relate to their beloved automobiles. Berger starts by noting that the automobile--along with roads (in the US, some 40 yards of highway per vehicle) and myriad other support systems--has become a major component of the human environment, for good and ill. But as the title of the first chapter here, ``Save the Car,'' indicates, the glory days of the personal car may be in the past, finished by pollution, dwindling oil supplies, and congestion. To discern the complex natural history of the car/driver symbiosis, Berger traveled the country on a ``Great American Driving Survey.'' A good deal of the trip was spent interviewing people (from street racers to traffic cops to suburbanites) about their driving habits, their feelings about their cars, and the impact of cars on their lives. In between, Berger visited various experts (from all levels of government as well from as the auto industry), looked at ads, ate fast food, and rode not only on public roads but on public transit. As might be expected from the author of a book entitled Zen Driving, Berger arrives at a holistic solution to the problem of the auto's future--one including not just legislation, zoning regulations, transportation policy, and highway design but also a growing ecological awareness and a reversal of the trend toward the kind of individuality that casts the auto as personal transportation. The author foresees--perhaps too optimistically-- a society in which the car, that great expander of human horizons, retains a place in a fully integrated ecosystem. Full of fascinating detail--especially in some of the interviews--and smoothly written. -- Copyright �1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

In this amusing, informative, alarming discussion of the effect of the automobile on our society, Berger (coauthor of Zen Driving ) reports on his cross-country random questioning of hundreds of drivers about their feelings toward their cars. Whether the cars are perceived as the Other Self, the Loved One, the Toy, the Grim Reaper, the Polluter or merely Necessary Transportation, most people seemed to agree with the sociologists, transportation experts, uban planners, environmentalists and citizens' groups that there are better solutions to our car-generated problems than continuing to pave over America. Berger discusses the drivers' ideas in the context of the tension between their attachment to the car and their recognition that something must be done about gridlock, pollution, commuting, safety, cost and the rest of it. Figuring prominently among the reports he cites is the sense of need for regional planning that emphasizes development of communities in which work is close to residential areas and suburban sprawl is limited. Alternately funny and passionate, this comprehensive discussion of how we love cars and what to do about them is entertaining, hopeful and full of ideas.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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