Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back.

• Author: Dunn, Seth

In the late 1950s, a senior editor for Fortune magazine named Jane Jacobs began - to the surprise of her colleagues - bicycling to work. Disturbed by the deterioration of the streets of New York City, she channeled her community activism into the writing of a major manifesto. Published in 1961, Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities eventually became a classic critique of the state of the urban environment in the United States.

Thirty years later, an architecture critic for The Nation magazine named Jane Holtz Kay sold - to the surprise of her colleagues - her car. Fed up with "shuttling a ton of steel to buy a popsicle," the Boston resident transformed her exile from the car culture into a labor of love. Published this past April, Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back is a brave foray into the world's most car ridden society - a "38.4 million acre monoculture of roads and parking lots" - that may, in time, also become a standard work in its field.

The automobile's tragic and devastating impact on U.S. cities and landscapes certainly deserves an epic, and Kay's five-year "odyssey through America's late auto age" makes a heroic effort to answer that call. Unlike its predecessors in the canon of car culture criticism, Asphalt Nation benefits from the ever-more sobering hindsight of the late-twentieth century - a point at which the car population of 200 million has since 1969 grown six times faster than the human population. As such, it opens the widest window to date on the complex relationship between a country and the car.

Even at the automobile's first appearance 90 years ago, several observers feared this so-called servant of society, for all the freedom and mobility it provided, would in time become its master. During the car's early heyday in the 1930s, one critic predicted the man-made creation would turn into a "Frankenstein of the twentieth century," spewing smoke and running out of control. Such nightmarish visions have become modern-day routines, condemning drivers to 72 billion hours stuck in smog-filled traffic each year.

But the importance of Kay's book lies in showing that these are superficial critiques: the influence of the automobile runs far deeper than most Americans realize - or are willing to admit. It is pervasive, she reveals, yet subtle in its control over virtually every dimension of life. Like Virgil in Dante's Divine Comedy, she guides the reader downward through the circles of hell (on wheels) into which a car-dependent society descends - such as the spiraling costs of environmental pollution, and the slippery slope of oil...