David Obst's "Saving Ourselves from Big Car"

David Obst is a former journalist, publisher, screenwriter, and film producer. He worked as a literary agent for Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, among others. Obst is the author of Too Good to Be Forgotten: Changing America in the ’60s and ’70s (1998).

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Saving Ourselves from Big Car, and shared the following:

Page 99 lands in a chapter titled Car Dreams that details how Big Car – the network of industries, insurers, lawmakers, and lobbyists that my book reveals are not so slowly killing us with car crashes, lead poisoning, and toxic emissions – sold the American people on the idea that a car in every driveway is the epitome of successful living.

The page starts with an ending. Bertha Ringer arrives home after driving 60 miles to visit her mother and launches a new craze – the family road trip. But we reveal that the husband who welcomes Bertha home is none other than Carl Benz – as in Mercedes Benz, and that “The accompanying publicity helped bring Bertha and Carl’s company its first sales.”

This road trip trend demonstrates how Big Car drove culture which then drove big business: “Motor tourism was literally a get-rich-quick scheme that worked. In fact, road trips became so popular in America that a National Road Trip Day was established and is still observed every Friday before Memorial Day.”

Of course, this suited Big Car’s needs, too, and it’s clear our cars were going to cost us, one way or another: “Big Car didn’t hesitate to serve these new motorists. . . automobile laundries began to appear [that] cost the equivalent of a typical office worker’s hourly pay ($1.50) for the service.”

Unfortunately, while a fun story, page 99 will not give readers a sense of what the book is about. The remainder of the book explains the tremendous cost we’ve paid, which is that Big Car, in the last hundred years, has killed more humans than World War II and destroyed our environment.

This is a well-documented exposé on how a conglomeration of the automobile, gasoline, insurance, construction, and lobbying industries has dominated our lives over the last hundred years. It proves that the key decisions made by Big Car were exclusively to increase their bottom lines, and that, even when they knew what they were doing was wrong, they continued to do it in the name of profit.

The book is an easy read, with a wealth of anecdotal material, and the final chapters examine people and communities that are trying to develop alternatives to our long-standing reliance on the personal automobile.

My hope is that, like Silent Spring and Unsafe at Any Speed, this book will start a new awareness of the critical need for us to take action before it’s too late.

Visit David Obst's website.

--Marshal Zeringue