Car Country

"For students and inhabitants of car country, Wells offers a terrific excavation of the sprawlscape that still drives our days."

"One of the great strengths of the book is Wells’s meticulous work in revealing how the institutional, economic, and mental arrangements supporting ‘Car Country’ were set in place during the interwar years. . . . Wells’s book is a remarkable achievement."

"A fresh, well-documented history of roadbuilding policies in the United States between 1900 and 1960."

"Relatively few academic geographers have focused their research and publishing directly on the automobile and its geographical implications for life in the United States. Yet nothing over the past century has had a greater effect on America’s geography than the public’s evolving dependence on the motor car, and, as well, the motor truck. . . . Christopher Wells’s opus will excite more geographers to focus on automobility as a fundamental factor underlying the American experience."

"In Car Country, Christopher W. Wells offers a compelling history of America’s signature car-dependent landscapes. With lively anecdotes, effective imagery, and dozens of illustrations, the book also presents an accessible narrative that will help students visualize how Americans gradually and profoundly transformed their nation."

"Wells has produced an important and persuasive new chapter in the history of American car culture."

"[Car Country] is an excellent and needed addition to the still remarkably small literature that explores the combined histories of Americans, automobiles, and the environment."

"Wells argues that in order to understand how automobility has become so deeply ‘locked in’ to contemporary American society, historians and geographers would do better to focus on the built landscape . . . [Car Country] belongs in the library of anyone interested in transportation, infrastructure, mobility, and land-use in twentieth-century America."

"[I]maginative and accessible. . . . General US historians should pay attention to Car Country. It joins a growing body of environmental history that is revising the traditional narrative of US history."

"Car Country is arguably the most carefully researched, clearly written, and consistently engaging study anyone has yet written exploring the far-flung and extraordinarily complicated landscapes created by and for automobiles in the twentieth-century United States. The story is all the more remarkable because most of us who now inhabit this landscape take it so much for granted without having the slightest clue how it came into being."

"Car Country offers a valuable historical perspective that is directly related to many pressing contemporary issues."