Volume 6, Number 7 · April 28, 1966
The American Way of Death
By Lewis Mumford
Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-in Dangers of the American Automobile
by Ralph Nader
Grossman, 365 pp., $5.95
Safety Last: An Indictment of the Auto Industry
by Jeffrey O'Connell, by Arthur Myers
Random House, 226 pp., $4.95
As so often happens, when the minds of many people have been silently brooding over the same subject, there has recently been an outbreak of books, articles, and legislative investigations, all devoted to assessing the mechanical defects, the bodily hazards, and the mounting social disadvantages of the motor car. The tone of this discussion has been critical, not to say sacrilegious. Some of the critics have dared to say that the Sacred Cow of the American Way of Life is overfed and bloated; that the daily milk she supplies is poisonous; that the pasturage this species requires wastes acres of land that could be used for more significant human purposes; and that the vast herds of sacred cows, allowed to roam everywhere, like their Hindu counterparts, are trampling down the vegetation, depleting wild life, and turning both urban and rural areas into a single smudgy wasteland, whose fancy sociological name is Megalopolis.
Review, 4778 words
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