A morbidly fascinating and articulate collection of essays, this book explores the grim underside of America's cult of the automobile and the disturbing, frequently conspiratorial, speculations that arise whenever the car becomes the cause or the site of human death. Through analysis of fatal celebrity car accidents and other examples of death by automobile, as well as through personal memoir and forensic reports, cultural critics ponder our very human fascination with the car crash. Topics include the roles and experiences of passengers and bystanders, car crash conspiracy theories, the automobile as a site of murder, studies of car crash cinema, and psychological interpretations of the notion of the 'accident.' The book features original essays by such underground icons as Kenneth Anger and Adam Parfrey.
In the aftermath of a traumatic event, a young man navigates small-town gossip, grief and recovery amidst a culture of toxic masculinity. “A heart-soaring act of literary bravery,” Car Crash is a hopeful, raw coming-of-age story for our times (Trent Dalton). “Bruisingly insightful.”—The Guardian • “Delivers from the first arresting page.”—Inside Story • “Moving, lyrical, warmly told and very funny.”—Brooke Davis, author of Lost & Found • “Shines with a fierce intelligence.”—Kristina Olsson, author of Shell Why did he get to live, and not them? This question has plagued Lech Blaine ever since he was a teenager, when he got into a car that never arrived at its destination. Of his crew of friends who were in the car, Blaine was the only passenger who made it out unscathed. In the aftermath of the accident that sent shockwaves through his small town, Blain was thrust into the local spotlight, fielding questions from journalists, police, and feeling pressure to perform his grief in public and on social media. In a community where men were expected to be strong and silent, Blaine felt that he had no one to turn to with his complicated emotions. In Car Crash, Blaine offers an intimate, brave account of what it’s like to survive a tragedy that others didn’t––and a moving portrait of a young person struggling to define his own masculinity. Blaine was raised to believe that being masculine meant projecting toughness, stoicism, and dominance, and this belief leads him to alcohol and disordered eating to cope with his pain. But as Blaine finally learns to open up with family, friends, and a therapist, he comes to realize the meaning of true strength, and the power of vulnerability to bring hope and healing. “Some books just have to be written. And some books just have to be read.”—Trent Dalton, author of Boy Swallows Universe
Carjacked is an in-depth look at our obsession with cars. While the automobile's contribution to global warming and the effects of volatile gas prices are is widely known, the problems we face every day because of our cars are much more widespread and yet much less known -- from the surprising $14,000 per year that the average family pays each year for the vehicles it owns, to the increase in rates of obesity and asthma to which cars contribute, to the 40,000 deaths and 2.5 million crash injuries each and every year. Carjacked details the complex impact of the automobile on modern society and shows us how to develop a healthier, cheaper, and greener relationship with cars.
Cars have a talismanic quality. No other manufactured object has the same disturbing allure. More emotions are involved in cars than any other product: vanity, cupidity, greed, social competitiveness, cultural modelling. But when all this perverse promise ends in catastrophe, these same talismanic qualities acquire an extra dimension. The car crash is a defining phenomenon of popular culture. Death Drive is both an appreciative essay about the historic place of the automobile in the modern imagination and an exploration of the circumstances surrounding multiple celebrity denouements, including Isadora Duncan, Jane Mansfield, James Dean, Jackson Pollack, Princess Grace, and Helmut Newton, among many others. En route the narrative traces one very big arc - the role of the car in extending or creating the personality of a celebrity - and concludes by confronting the imminent death of the car itself. AUTHOR: Stephen Bayley recounts delightfully grotesque tales about celebrities done in by trees, by lampposts, or by nonentities in ancient Chevys. A design masterpiece, this book combines exquisite prose with stylish presentation - the cars are described more lovingly than the people who perished in them. Like a Bugatti, Death Drive recalls a time when books and cars were beautiful. SELLING POINTS: * Albert Camus once remarked that there's "nothing more absurd than to die in a car accident". That was before his car hit a tree at 80mph. Death Drive - a compendium of stories about famous people killed stupidly in cars - oozes absurdity * A Times Book of the Year, 2016 * Big names like James Dean, Jackson Pollack, and Princess Grace are among the victims 72 colour photographs
Since Princess Diana's car crash in 1997, media interest in the crash as an event needing explanation has proliferated. The purpose of this collection is to subject texts or films, within which crashes figure, to well-defined cultural study.
Fast Cars, Clean Bodies examines the crucial decade from Dien Bien Phu to the mid-1960s when France shifted rapidly from an agrarian, insular, and empire-oriented society to a decolonized, Americanized, and fully industrial one. In this analysis of a startling cultural transformation Kristin Ross finds the contradictions of the period embedded in its various commodities and cultural artifacts—automobiles, washing machines, women's magazines, film, popular fiction, even structuralism—as well as in the practices that shape, determine, and delimit their uses. In each of the book's four chapters, a central object of mythical image is refracted across a range of discursive and material spaces: social and private, textual and cinematic, national and international. The automobile, the new cult of cleanliness in the capital and the colonies, the waning of Sartre and de Beauvoir as the couple of national attention, and the emergence of reshaped, functionalist masculinities (revolutionary, corporate, and structural) become the key elements in this prehistory of postmodernism in France. Modernization ideology, Ross argues, offered the promise of limitless, even timeless, development. By situating the rise of "end of history" ideologies within the context of France's transition into mass culture and consumption, Ross returns the touted timelessness of modernization to history. She shows how the realist fiction and film of the period, as well as the work of social theorists such as Barthes, Lefebvre, and Morin who began at the time to conceptualize "everyday life," laid bare the disruptions and the social costs of events. And she argues that the logic of the racism prevalent in France today, focused on the figure of the immigrant worker, is itself the outcome of the French state's embrace of capitalist modernization ideology in the 1950s and 1960s.
TRB's Commercial Truck and Bus Safety Synthesis Program (CTBSSP) Synthesis 14: The Role of Safety Culture in Preventing Commercial Motor Vehicle Crashes explores practices on developing and enhancing a culture of safety among commercial motor vehicle drivers. The report also examines suggested steps for increasing a safety culture through a series of best practices.
The face of the pedestrian safety crisis looks a lot like Ignacio Duarte-Rodriguez. The 77-year old grandfather was struck in a hit-and-run crash while trying to cross a high-speed, six-lane road without crosswalks near his son’s home in Phoenix, Arizona. He was one of the more than 6,000 people killed while walking in America in 2018. In the last ten years, there has been a 50 percent increase in pedestrian deaths. The tragedy of traffic violence has barely registered with the media and wider culture. Disproportionately the victims are like Duarte-Rodriguez—immigrants, the poor, and people of color. They have largely been blamed and forgotten. In Right of Way, journalist Angie Schmitt shows us that deaths like Duarte-Rodriguez’s are not unavoidable “accidents.” They don’t happen because of jaywalking or distracted walking. They are predictable, occurring in stark geographic patterns that tell a story about systemic inequality. These deaths are the forgotten faces of an increasingly urgent public-health crisis that we have the tools, but not the will, to solve. Schmitt examines the possible causes of the increase in pedestrian deaths as well as programs and movements that are beginning to respond to the epidemic. Her investigation unveils why pedestrians are dying—and she demands action. Right of Way is a call to reframe the problem, acknowledge the role of racism and classism in the public response to these deaths, and energize advocacy around road safety. Ultimately, Schmitt argues that we need improvements in infrastructure and changes to policy to save lives. Right of Way unveils a crisis that is rooted in both inequality and the undeterred reign of the automobile in our cities. It challenges us to imagine and demand safer and more equitable cities, where no one is expendable.
Despite the ubiquity of automobility, the reality of automotive death is hidden from everyday view. There are accident blackspots all over the roads that we use and go past every day but the people that have died there or been injured are not marked, unless by homemade shrines and personal memorialization. Nowhere on the planet is this practice as densely actioned as in the United States. Road Scars is a highly visual scholarly monograph about how roadside car crash shrines place the collective trauma of living in a car culture in the everyday landscapes of automobility. Roadside shrines—or road trauma shrines—are vernacular memorial assemblages built by private individuals at sites where family and friends have died in automobile accidents, either while driving cars or motorcycles or being hit by cars as pedestrians, bicyclists, or motorcyclists. Prevalent for decades in Latin America and in the American Southwest, roadside car crash shrines are now present throughout the U.S. and around the world. Some are simply small white crosses, almost silent markers of places of traumatic death. Others are elaborate collections of objects, texts, and materials from all over the map culturally and physically, all significantly brought together not in the home or in a cemetery but on the roadside, in drivable public space—a space where private individuals perform private identities alongside each other in public, and where these private mobilities sometimes collide with one another in traumatic ways that are negotiated in roadside shrines. This book touches on something many of us have seen, but few have explored intellectually.
