Highways to Heaven: The Auto Biography of America

by Christopher Finch

Book Overview

From the days of the horseless carriage to today's prototypes of tomorrow's cars, longtime auto aficionado Christopher Finch explores the American attraction and obession for the automobile, and examines the profound effect it has had on American life. 100 photographs.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060165510
• ISBN13: 9780060165512
• Release Date: January 1992
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Length: 416 Pages
• Weight: 1.76 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.2" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

On the Automobile and America's 20th Century, Nothing Better

Virtually all serious books on the automobile are, in some form or other, polemics, taking one side or another of the endless cultural wars about the car, treating it as brute villan despoiling the environment, gulping gas, spreading sprawl, destroying mass transit and undermining community character and individual morals, or as the ultimate manifestation of American industrial might and consumer culture, opening up the landscape, freeing the individual to make his own choices, making gracious suburban living and escape from noxious and failed cities possible, and serving as the prideful foundation of American culture. Finch's book is happily different. Written by an author who manages to be a serious lover of car travel (not just cars, an important and oft overlooked distinction), an environmentally aware citizen and a lover of American culture, it is a clear eyed, dispassionate walk through the automobile's role in shaping 20th century America that does not hide any warts but captures fully all the dynamism that the car released into American life. The book is particularly good on how the automobile first liberated an enormously varied manifestation of local responses and then, as it enabled people to venture into new and strange locales, became an enormous force for homogenization of American life (i.e. national chains like MacDonald's replacing local drive-ins, freeways becoming the standard model for roads) as a people sought familiarity and predictability in unknown places. And, for those who grew up in the American West, it captures the space conquering sense the car gives particularly well. As told by Finch, the relation of the auto and Americans began as a love story, but it is now a marriage, one with lots of sex and mutual affection and likely to last, but one that has all the rough spots and smoothed-over incompatibilties of a real marriage as well, most of which are more likely to be endured into the future than resolved. A must read for transportation planners, urbanists, environmentalists and general lovers of American culture. Its insights have not aged at all in the 15 years since its 1992 writing.