Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and Its Effect on Our Lives

For most of the twentieth century, America's love affair with the car went unchallenged. Gas prices were kept low, ever more roads and highways built and maintained, and this year's model always looked a little better than last year's. Then, in fairly short order, gas jumped to $4 a gallon, the housing bubble imploded and the current economic crisis was upon us. Suddenly, car owners had reason to question what is on average, their biggest household expense.Carjacked gets into the meat of America's obsession with cars and explodes myth after myth along the way. While the automobile's contribution to global warming and the effects of volatile gas prices are is widely known, the problems Americans face every day because of their cars are much more widespread and yet much less known - from the surprising $14,000 per year that the average car costs to own to the uptick of incidences of obesity and asthma that car ownership seemingly causes to the more than 6 million car accidents a year at a cost of $230 billion.Carjacked sheds new light on the complex impact of the automobile on American society and shows us how to develop a new and healthier relationship with cars, a relationship that is both cheaper and greener.

Catherine Lutz is a Watson Institute professor at Brown University where she holds a joint appointment with the Department of Anthropology. As an author and editor, Professor Lutz has published nine books. Until recently, she was the president of the American Ethnological Society, the oldest professional anthropological association in the United States. Anne Lutz Fernandez is a former marketer and investment banker with fifteen years of corporate experience. She is an English teacher in Westport, Connecticut.