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BOOK: The Big Book of Car Culture: The Armchair Guide to Automotive Americana
By Jim Hinckley and Jon G. Robinson, 320 pages, $24.95 (Motorbooks/MBI Publishing)
Reviewed by Holly Day
This book is going to mean something different to whichever generation reads it. To me, a child of the ‘70s, the book was a nostalgic reminder of traveling in the back of my parents’ VW minibus, stopping at all sorts of crazy roadside diners run by crazy-haired matrons, and parking on the shoulder of whatever empty road we were traveling down to camp out for the night. To the generations before me, this book will, no doubt bring up all sorts of wonderful memories of watching the passing shapes and sizes and ideals that made up the evolution of the automobile. To Generation Y and beyond, there’ll probably be a whole lot of wondering head-scratching at the whole notion of a “road trip” or even the concept that not all cars have to look exactly the same, since obviously, one bland, streamlined shape serves everyone so well—I guess I’m just a bitter old lady, still stuck on fancy tail fins and chrome hubcaps.
There is something to the fact that too many people today seem to think the purpose of a road trip is to reach the destination, instead of taking the whole ride in as part of the package. This book is full of beautiful and novel places that used to lure travelers to briefly stop and gawk, like gigantic duck- or shoe-shaped diners, bizarre little museums that refuse to advertise what you’re paying to see (like the museum to The Thing! which was also frustratingly not revealed in the book). Wonderful little independent food stands—like the one that invented the corn dog—and curio shops that once stretched along Route 66 have now almost all disappeared due to travelers’ preference to taking the quicker interstate routes, replaced by giant fast food chains that have nothing to lose by the decrease in traffic.
Great attention is also paid to the evolution of the modern automobile, with sections dedicated to the independent automobile inventors that paraded out design after design up until the 1950s, when the government placed regulation on the industry. The fantastically beautiful Duesenberg (ever wonder where the phrase, “It’s a Duesy/doozy?” comes from?) is profiled, as is a variety alternative-powered vehicles, 8-wheeled cars, the Checker cab company, and the Ford Model-T. There’s also a short section on the Harley-Davidson company and its founders and “electric bicycles” in general.
But that’s not all! There are also short segments on police technology, hotel and motel chains across the country, automobile graveyards, tourist traps, crash test dummies, dealership giveaways, and roller coaster rides, all with accompanying period photographs and postcards. Perhaps it’s in this all-inclusive approach that the book starts to run into trouble—there’s a lot of information here, and there’s not enough room in its 315 pages of text to flesh anything out to great detail. Hence, I suppose, the term “armchair guide.” There aren’t a lot of new photographs here, either, and myself, if a site listed in a book like this is still in existence, I would prefer to see at least one recent photograph of the site as opposed to just one that’s nearly 30 years old. Overall, though, the book is really beautiful to look at, and is a good overview of what kind of impact automobiles have made on our everyday life, and the face of America in general.
© 2007 - Holly Day