Drive

This book explores the experience of driving cars as a way of encountering landscapes and cities around the world. A richly illustrated cultural history, drawing on social and urban history, art, literature and music, Drive explores in particular how car driving is portrayed in cinema and other moving images, from America to Europe and Asia, and from Hollywood to the avant-garde.

Drive is about dynamic journeys, experiences and speeds, rooted in specific places and roads, and expanded into the realm of cinema, art and video games. It moves from the gentle deserts of The Grapes of Wrath to the adventurous city streets of The Italian Job, from the aesthetic delights of Rain Man and Traffic to the existential musings of Two-Lane Blacktop, Thelma and Louise and Vanishing Point, from the contemplative freeway pleasures of Lift to the Scaffold, Radio On and London Orbital to the hallucinatory high-speed dangers of Crash, Bullitt, Death Proof and C’était un Rendezvous. It shows how various kinds of driving – with different speeds, cars, attitudes, roads and cities – provide experiences and values that we ignore at our peril. Written by a leading urban and cultural historian, Drive’s conclusion is a timely riposte to commonplace anti-car attitudes.