Furthermore: Where the Headlines Take You

Car Crazy

General Motor's bankruptcy filing this Monday is all over the news – one element that's been widely reported locally is the closure of 40% of the company's dealership franchises throughout the U.S., including many in Oregon. I don't know why I never stopped to think about it before, but it was news to me that car dealerships are often franchises, rather than fully independent local businesses. So of course, I turned to the library's amazing collection to see if I could learn more about the history of selling cars in the U.S., and I found a great book that got me started on a trajectory of reading about the automobile industry, the impact of cars on cities, and more. Read on if you'd like to share this journey with me!

I started with the pictorial celebration and history of the American way of selling cars in Robert Genat's The American Car Dealership. Genat starts out with a brief history of the automobile business, explaining the rise and fall of the many small car manufacturers in the early 20th century, the eventual rise of the "Big Three," and the methods all of them used to get their product from the assembly line into the hands of American drivers. He also discusses the architecture of car dealerships, promotional strategies they employed, the art of car salesmanship, the used car business, and the role of dealers' parts and service departments. There are fascinating historic photos to illustrate this narrative on every single page.

Obviously cars themselves have completely changed the American landscape. The next book I turned to was Down the Asphalt Path, Clay McShane's history of the rise of the automobile and the development of 20th century cities and suburbs. In a way, it's more a history of roads than it is a history of cars – McShane sets the stage with a history of urban travel before the arrival of streetcars, then discusses the development of large streetcar networks and their attendant streetcar suburbs, then examines various uses of urban streets in recent history. After providing all this context, he examines how the technology for building smoother roads developed, and explains how Americans began to view streets as arteries for transport rather than open public spaces for socializing and providing fresh air and light in crowded cities. Down the Asphalt Path is a serious intellectual work, but it's also an engaging story tracing the changes in American streets (which, after all, cover a pretty significant portion of the land in our cities!).

My personal experience has been that the different kinds of cars on the road is part of what makes different places special. For example, I lived on the east coast for a few years, and it really made me nostalgic for Oregon, where classic cars are fairly common – because in the east, all you see is late model stuff. Another thing we've got a lot of here on the west coast is art cars. You've probably seen one or two around town, but if you want a real eyeful, take a peek at Harrod Blank's photo book Art Cars. It's a hundred and forty pages of amazing, one-of-a-kind cars. Seriously, these cars are incredible! One is completely covered in beer cans, another in cigarette butts, another in Pez dispensers. World-famous telekinetic Uri Geller is pictured with his car, which is, you guessed it, covered in bent spoons and forks. There's no way I could describe all the fabulous cars in this book, you'll have to check it out yourself!

But perhaps you want to create your own auto-related tangent? More power to you! If you want to leaf through some beautiful pictures of classic cars, learn about how cars have influenced and shaped society, or read about the history of car design or of the the auto industry, the library can totally help you out with that too! Or, of course, you can always ask a friendly librarian to help steer you towards the car book, article, DVD, or website that's just right for you.

Cars. . . And the Trouble With Them

Cars.  Boy do we Americans love them! Personally, I'm not a big fan of driving. To me, being stuck in traffic is like taking crazy pills and parallel parking makes me break out in a sweat.  But on long stretches of road, say out in Eastern Oregon - with the wind in my hair and my favorite tunes on the radio - well there is definitely an appeal.  But like many things that give us that warm fuzzy feeling, driving isn't very good for us or our planet.  And though folks have been telling us for decades that our addiction to cars and oil would be our undoing, the love affair was too strong.  Now we are starting to get it, and because of this, an entire industry is hurting big time.  In July 2008, Automotive News reported that sales for the first half of 2008 were the worst the U.S. auto industry had seen since 1993.  Sales totaled $7,414,295, down 10.1 percent from 2007.* So, the big tree (Ford, GM and Chrysler) went to Washington asking for help back in November and again on Tuesday, this time offering to sell their corporate jets and take a pay cut from what was millions in 2007 to just $1 a year, if Congress was willing to help out.  How will this all play out?  Will U.S. automakers start to make the fuel-efficient cars we need?  What happens when the oil runs out?  We've got years of these issues ahead of us, and I can't help but wonder what kind of vehicles our children's children will be driving someday.

But in the meantime, there is a lot of great work out there on the auto industry, the environment, and the future of cars.  One excellent example is the book Zoom, written by Iain Carson and Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran.  Carson and Vaitheeswaran are both correspondents for The Economist, and they have written this surprisingly enjoyable and ultimately timely book arguing for U.S. energy independence by weaning cars off oil.  Their book is far from the doom and gloom outlook we've been hearing about from the auto industry, instead it's very optimistic about the future of cars.  In fact, they contend it isn't the cars at all that are at fault, it's the oil that's the problem and more drilling is not the answer.  And with the great minds out there in the world, they believe there are many viable, earth-friendly solutions available for our crazy, car-loving culture!

In Auto Mania, Tom McCarthy discusses the history of the automotive industry and specifically the connection between the car, the consumer, and the environment.  McCarthy's book is well researched (with 65 pages of notes!) and looks deep into the seedy underbelly of the auto industry.  He goes into detail about the automobiles immense draw on the earth's natural resources, including the ill-effects on air and water, not to mention the junkyards.  He also talks about the reasons behind the industry's resistance to change and basically about what got us into this mess!  Plus, it's got some fun pictures and photographs.

And there is a fascinating (and honestly, pretty upsetting) documentary titled Who Killed the Electric Car? written and directed by Chris Paine.  To get you interested, here is the tagline from the film, "In 1996, electric cars began to appear on roads all over California. They were quiet and fast, produced no exhaust and ran without gasoline...........Ten years later, these cars were destroyed."  Interested?  Definitely check it out.  Though prepare yourself, I found myself getting pretty angry!

*Article found in the library's ABI/INFORM Trade & Industry database available from anywhere with a valid Multnomah County Library card.  You can read the entire article by clicking here - from outside the library, you will need your library card number and PIN.