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eBook Asphalt Nation download

by Jane Holtz Kay

ISBN: 0520216202
Author: Jane Holtz Kay
Publisher: University of California Press; First edition (October 1, 1998)
Language: English
Pages: 432
ePub: 1245 kb
Fb2: 1679 kb
Rating: 4.9
Other formats: txt azw mobi docx
Category: Different
Subcategory: Humanities

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Jane Holtz Kay. I have very mixed feelings about this book. The first chapter is awesome. The last section (the last six chapters) is also very good.

Jane Holtz Kay. However, the author seems to ramble on in the middle of the book, concerned more by her ability to impress her audience with a very extensive vocabulary than conveying the compelling and condemning facts against the car. Also, there are several glaring errors in the book. The one that comes most readily to mind is where she misspelled Gresham, OR, but there were others too.

Jane Holtz Kay's book has given us a profound way of seeing the automobile's ruinous impact on American life. Asphalt Nation is terrific. ―Jane Jacobs, author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Although I wholeheartedly agree with Jane Holtz Kay that the car is ruining America (I just junked mine and started taking the train), I wish she had done a better job of writing about the problem

Jane Holtz Kay (born Jane Holtz; July 7, 1938, Boston – died November 4, 2012) was an American urban design and architecture critic.

Jane Holtz Kay (born Jane Holtz; July 7, 1938, Boston – died November 4, 2012) was an American urban design and architecture critic. A columnist for The Nation, The Boston Globe and The New York Times, she authored three books on the conservation of natural and urban environments, most notably Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back.

In Asphalt Nation, Jane Holtz Kay effectively calls for a revolution to reverse our y. Citing successful efforts in places from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon, Kay shows us that radical change is not impossible by any means. She demonstrates that there are economic, political, architectural, and personal solutions that can steer us out of the mess. Asphalt Nation is essential reading for everyone interested in the history of our relationship with the car, and in the prospect of returning to a world of human mobility.

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бесплатно, без регистрации и без смс. Asphalt Nationis a major work of urban studies that examines how the automobile has ravaged America's cities and landscape, and how we can fight back. The automobile was once seen as a boon to American life, eradicating the pollution caused by horses and granting citizens new levels of personal freedom and mobility

Asphalt Nation is a powerful examination of how the automobile has ravaged America's cities and landscape over the past 100 years together with a compelling strategy for reversing our automobile dependency. Jane Holtz Kay provides a history of the rapid spread of the automobile and documents the huge subsidies commanded by the highway lobby, to the detriment of once-efficient forms of mass transportation. Demonstrating that there are economic, political, architectural, and personal solutions to the problem, she shows that radical change is entirely possible. This book is essential reading for everyone interested in the history of our relationship with the car, and in the prospect of returning to a world of human mobility.

Comments: (7)

Dondallon

This book arrived well within the forecasted delivery and in good condition. I am in the process of reading about what cars have done to our culture, of special interest to me as the Millennials are the first generation in the past 50 or more years who are not buying cars -- Big Positive Changes are coming -- and about time, too.

Lynnak

Although I wholeheartedly agree with Jane Holtz Kay that the car is ruining America (I just junked mine and started taking the train), I wish she had done a better job of writing about the problem. Asphalt Nation is chock-full of cliche's -- sometimes repeated on the same page -- and contains such horrible misquotations as "think locally, act globally" (p. 267), that one wonders whether the author was awake during much of her task, or perhaps writing under a strict deadline.
The content is wanting too. Despite the "how we can take it back" part of the subtitle, the book contains no apendices or tables listing resources for anti-car activism; I have had to jot down notes _en passant_ and look up the names she mentions using the internet.
This is all very unfortunate, because the point of the book needs to be made, and I give Jane Holtz Kay three stars for making it. But if this is the best kind of popular scholarship and writing we can expect in support of the anti-auto movement, then that movement is likely doomed.

Conjukus

Less a book than a book-length sort of reportage, Asphalt Nation builds the case against the automobile to almost absurd heights. After reading the first half of the book, you wonder why cars are even legal in this country! Cars pollute, pollution is toxic, OK, we get that. Enough already.

I was more taken with the second part, where Kay reports the history of how automobiles, and specifically traffic planners, conspired to create the sprawling, pedestrian-hostile multilane disaster we call the modern American city. This portion of the book was fascinating, and I would have liked twice as much of it.

At the end of the day, however, I was hoping the author would have a more nuanced and thoughtful point of view than, "Cars are bad, walking is good." I already knew that. Still and all, a great book if you're inclined to think that maybe what your city needs is NOT one or two more left-turn lanes.

Steep

A must read for all Zoning Boards. Don't wait until your aquifer is depleted and vegetation is no longer absorbing the CO2.

Ms. Kay knows what she is talking about and expresses her ideas, oh, so well.

Keath

This book is very thorough about describing how cars became ingrained in our lives, but it didn't offer much insight. I'm guessing most people who read this book have some notion of how urban sprawl leads to car dependency and lack of inner-city. This book does little more than re-state that.
Additional weak points:
- No presence of counter argument.
- Repetitive
- Not enough attention was payed to the 'taking it back' portion of the title. Roughly 4/5 of the book were taking over America, 1/5 taking it back. No new ideas were presented in the 'taking it back' section.

Gholbirdred

It has been many years since I read this book. But I recall enjoying it thoroughly and getting through it pretty quickly. Contains a great deal if information I had been unaware of. Well done and highly recommended.

Cel

No wonder our American jobs are being outsourced oversees - we demand more money from our employers so that we can drive farther from our home to work and spend, spend, spend on our cars to do this. We think buying a cheaper house in the 'sububs' saves money, but we spend more money on our cars and gas bills in the long term than we initially bargained for. Living closer to where we work maybe the solution - or telecommuiting (whatever happened to that idea?) but that's not really the point of the book, just an unstated theme throughout. I thought I could live in the county and work from home, but now I spend $500 a month on driving into the city and wasting precious time trapped in a car. Live and Learn - and think about reading this book (or at least the reviews...)

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