Book Reviews and Such

I've got a review in the Independent this week of Mobility without Mayhem, a new book by NCSU professor Jeremy Packer on the rhetoric of safety and the technologies of control surrounding the automobile. I like the book a lot, but as I say in my review, I find it a little incomplete at its margins; Packer addresses neither the historical circumstances that caused the car to become the central technology of American domestic life in the first place, nor the way this dialogue of safety has shifted in contemporary debates about consumer culture and its environmental costs.

I just find both of these questions too key to be bracketed or put aside.

Jaimee's also been busy with the Indy lately, with a review of a local press's limited-edition art book on birdhouses of the South and another of perennial McSweeney's contributor Dan Kennedy's novel-memoir of life in the record business. She was also a judge for their recent poetry contest, which you can read all about here...