Download or read book America s Addiction to Automobiles written by Chad Frederick and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-09-21 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A provocative look at our nation's dependency on the automobile and how its potential impact on urban design will either make or break our health, economy, and quality of life. In this thought-provoking work, author and urban planning expert Chad Frederick scrutinizes the use of automobiles in cities, investigating its role in exacerbating urban inequalities and thwarting sustainability of modern society. Through a comprehensive, thoughtful discussion, Frederick illustrates how the automobile is fundamentally at odds with the very nature of cities. He shows how cars impose huge burdens on our health, equity, environment, local and national economy, and quality of life. Most of all, he shows how automobile dependency has put our entire society at risk. The book delves into the monumental role of automobiles in the development of cities after the Great Depression, impacting the American identity and affecting the way we produce and manage urban spaces. Frederick provides compelling evidence that cities with more diverse modes of transportation are greener, healthier, more prosperous, and even more enjoyable places to live than automobile-dependent cities. He identifies one institution responsible for our inability to improve our cities: the social sciences, and examines the root cause of our inability to make progress toward more multi-modal cities. In conclusion, the author offers a radical solution for moving beyond the underlying logic that forces us to create automobile-dependent cities.
Download or read book Asphalt Nation written by Jane Holtz Kay and published by Crown. This book was released on 2012-06-20 with total page 538 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Asphalt Nation is a major work of urban studies that examines how the automobile has ravaged America’s cities and landscape, and how we can fight back. The automobile was once seen as a boon to American life, eradicating the pollution caused by horses and granting citizens new levels of personal freedom and mobility. But it was not long before the servant became the master—public spaces were designed to accommodate the automobile at the expense of the pedestrian, mass transportation was neglected, and the poor, unable to afford cars, saw their access to jobs and amenities worsen. Now even drivers themselves suffer, as cars choke the highways and pollution and congestion have replaced the fresh air of the open road. Today our world revolves around the car—as a nation, we spend eight billion hours a year stuck in traffic. In Asphalt Nation, Jane Holtz Kay effectively calls for a revolution to reverse our automobile-dependency. Citing successful efforts in places from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon, Kay shows us that radical change is not impossible by any means. She demonstrates that there are economic, political, architectural, and personal solutions that can steer us out of the mess. Asphalt Nation is essential reading for everyone interested in the history of our relationship with the car, and in the prospect of returning to a world of human mobility.
Download or read book Diseasing of America written by Stanton Peele and published by Jossey-Bass. This book was released on 1999-02-03 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Controversial Argument Against the Disease Theory of Addiction Diseasing of America is a powerful and controversial rebuttal to the "addiction as disease model" that many vested interests-including doctors, counselors, psychologists, treatment centers, and twelve-step programs that specialize in addiction treatment-don't want you to read."I found the arguments in Diseasing of America persuasive and carefully documented. While I find current addiction-treatment models helpful, I think it is critical to look at Stanton Peele's work to question our fundamental assumptions and adjust them on the basis of data."-Jennifer P. Schneider, author of Back From Betrayal and Sex, Lies, and Forgiveness, and member of the American Society of Addiction Medicine"A provocative review of the uses and abuses of the disease model in the past three decades. This important book has significantly added to my education and clinical understanding of addiction in my professional practice."-Richard R. Irons, M.D., The Menninger Clinic
Download or read book Coming Clean written by Michael Brune and published by Counterpoint. This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michael Brune, executive director of Rainforest Action Network (RAN), shows us how we, as motivated citizens, can kick our own fossil-fuel habit and pressure policymakers and corporations to change their energy priorities. His vivid reports remind us of the economic, environmental, moral, and public-health costs of fossil-fuel dependence, and how our government and international banks are complicit. Brune also describes the most promising developments in renewables, biofuels, and efficient design, and offers an inspiring vision of the clean energy future within our reach. Under Brune's leadership, RAN has had stunning success in getting corporations to green their business practices, and his activist skills and passion are at the heart of this book. Overflowing with pragmatic and well-tested advice, Coming Clean is rooted in the author's faith that Americans acting together can create profound change.--From publisher description.
Download or read book A Nation of Moochers written by Charles J. Sykes and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2012-01-17 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We have experienced a shift in American character: we've become a nation of moochers. Increasingly dependent on the efforts of others over our own, Americans are free to freeload. From the corporate bailouts on Wall Street to the alarming increases in personal default and dependency, from questionable tax exemptions to enormous pension, healthcare, and other entitlement costs, the new moocher culture cuts across lines of class, race, and private and public sectors. And the millions that plan and behave sensibly, only to bail out the profligate? They're angry. Charles Sykes' argument is not against compassion or legitimate charity, but targets the new moocher culture, in which self-reliance and personal responsibility have given way to mass grasping after handouts. A Nation of Moochers is a persuasively argued and entertaining rallying cry for Americans who are tired of playing by the rules and paying for those who don't.
Download or read book Smack written by Eric C. Schneider and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2013-04-19 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do the vast majority of heroin users live in cities? In his provocative history of heroin in the United States, Eric C. Schneider explains what is distinctively urban about this undisputed king of underworld drugs. During the twentieth century, New York City was the nation's heroin capital—over half of all known addicts lived there, and underworld bosses like Vito Genovese, Nicky Barnes, and Frank Lucas used their international networks to import and distribute the drug to cities throughout the country, generating vast sums of capital in return. Schneider uncovers how New York, as the principal distribution hub, organized the global trade in heroin and sustained the subcultures that supported its use. Through interviews with former junkies and clinic workers and in-depth archival research, Schneider also chronicles the dramatically shifting demographic profile of heroin users. Originally popular among working-class whites in the 1920s, heroin became associated with jazz musicians and Beat writers in the 1940s. Musician Red Rodney called heroin the trademark of the bebop generation. "It was the thing that gave us membership in a unique club," he proclaimed. Smack takes readers through the typical haunts of heroin users—52nd Street jazz clubs, Times Square cafeterias, Chicago's South Side street corners—to explain how young people were initiated into the drug culture. Smack recounts the explosion of heroin use among middle-class young people in the 1960s and 1970s. It became the drug of choice among a wide swath of youth, from hippies in Haight-Ashbury and soldiers in Vietnam to punks on the Lower East Side. Panics over the drug led to the passage of increasingly severe legislation that entrapped heroin users in the criminal justice system without addressing the issues that led to its use in the first place. The book ends with a meditation on the evolution of the war on drugs and addresses why efforts to solve the drug problem must go beyond eliminating supply.
Download or read book Hell on Wheels written by David Blanke and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating look at the rise and growing popularity of the automobile during the first half of twentieth-century America, which brought with it a dark undercurrent. On the one hand, Americans embraced the newfound sense of freedom and mobility embodied by the automobile; on the other, they grew increasingly anxious about and fearful of the enormous threat that cars--and car accidents--posed to public safety.
Download or read book Credit Card Nation The Consequences Of America s Addiction To Credit written by Robert D. Manning and published by . This book was released on 2000-12-25 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Credit Card Nation is the first comprehensive look at an ongoing social and economic crisis-America's escalting dependence on credit. By locating consumer debt within the context of corporate and governmental debt.
Download or read book American Fix written by Ryan Hampton and published by All Points Books. This book was released on 2018-08-28 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nearly every American knows someone who has been affected by the opioid crisis. Addiction is a trans-partisan issue that impacts individuals from every walk of life. Millions of Americans, tired of watching their loved ones die while politicians ignore this issue. Where is the solution? Where is the hope? Where's the outrage? Ryan Hampton is a young man who has made addiction and recovery reform his life's mission. Through the wildly successful non-profit organization Facing Addiction, Hampton has been rocketed to the center of America’s rising recovery movement—quickly emerging as the de facto leader of the national conversation on addiction. He understands firsthand how easy it is to develop a dependency on opioids, and how destructive it can quickly become. Now, he is waging a permanent campaign to change our way of thinking about and addressing addiction in this country. In American Fix, Hampton describes his personal struggle with addiction, outlines the challenges that the recovery movement currently faces, and offers a concrete, comprehensive plan of action towards making America’s addiction crisis a thing of the past.
Download or read book The Automobile and American Life 2d ed written by John Heitmann and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2018-07-31 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now revised and updated, this book tells the story of how the automobile transformed American life and how automotive design and technology have changed over time. It details cars' inception as a mechanical curiosity and later a plaything for the wealthy; racing and the promotion of the industry; Henry Ford and the advent of mass production; market competition during the 1920s; the development of roads and accompanying highway culture; the effects of the Great Depression and World War II; the automotive Golden Age of the 1950s; oil crises and the turbulent 1970s; the decline and then resurgence of the Big Three; and how American car culture has been represented in film, music and literature. Updated notes and a select bibliography serve as valuable resources to those interested in automotive history.
Download or read book The Great Book of American Automobiles written by Andrew Montgomery and published by Motorbooks International. This book was released on 2002 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explore this encyclopedia of cars complemented by an exciting story about the social and economic climate of American culture. This massive 512 page book charts the progress of the automobile in America from 1907, through the explosive automotive creativity of the fifties and the renaissance of the nineties, and on to the future of the industry. It highlights the work of the big three, Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors, and also covers the smaller companies that didn't survive the thirties and forties like Crosley, Packard and Studebaker.The history of the automobile in America is in many ways the story of the American dream. The best and the worst, the successes and the failures, the classics and the bizarre - the cars that America has taken to her heart have defined American culture.The ten years following World War I in America saw the birth of mobility for the masses as car ownership changed from being a privilege of a wealthy minority to an essential part of the American way of life. Hardcover, 9" x 12", 512 pages, 500 color & 20 b/w photos
Download or read book Machines of Youth written by Gary S. Cross and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-05-04 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For American teenagers, getting a driver’s license has long been a watershed moment, separating teens from their childish pasts as they accelerate toward the sweet, sweet freedom of their futures. With driver’s license in hand, teens are on the road to buying and driving(and maybe even crashing) their first car, a machine which is home to many a teenage ritual—being picked up for a first date, “parking” at a scenic overlook, or blasting the radio with a gaggle of friends in tow. So important is this car ride into adulthood that automobile culture has become a stand-in, a shortcut to what millions of Americans remember about their coming of age. Machines of Youth traces the rise, and more recently the fall, of car culture among American teens. In this book, Gary S. Cross details how an automobile obsession drove teen peer culture from the 1920s to the 1980s, seducing budding adults with privacy, freedom, mobility, and spontaneity. Cross shows how the automobile redefined relationships between parents and teenage children, becoming a rite of passage, producing new courtship rituals, and fueling the growth of numerous car subcultures. Yet for teenagers today the lure of the automobile as a transition to adulthood is in decline.Tinkerers are now sidelined by the advent of digital engine technology and premolded body construction, while the attention of teenagers has been captured by iPhones, video games, and other digital technology. And adults have become less tolerant of teens on the road, restricting both cruising and access to drivers’ licenses. Cars are certainly not going out of style, Cross acknowledges, but how upcoming generations use them may be changing. He finds that while vibrant enthusiasm for them lives on, cars may no longer be at the center of how American youth define themselves. But, for generations of Americans, the modern teen experience was inextricably linked to this particularly American icon.
Download or read book The Opioid Fix written by Barbara Andraka-Christou and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2020-04-21 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why medication-assisted treatment, the most effective tool for battling opioid addiction, is significantly underused in the United States. Bronze Winner of the 2021 IPPY Book Award in Health/Medicine/Nutrition, Gold Winner of the 2020 Foreword INDIES Award in Health America's addiction crisis is growing worse. More than 115 Americans die daily from opioid overdoses, with half a million deaths expected in the next decade. Time and again, scientific studies show that medications like Suboxone and methadone are the most reliable and effective treatment, yet more than 60 percent of US addiction treatment centers fail to provide access to them. In The Opioid Fix, Barbara Andraka-Christou highlights both the promise and the underuse of medication-assisted treatment (MAT). Addiction, Andraka-Christou writes, is a chronic medical condition. Why treat it, then, outside of mainstream medicine? Drawing on more than 100 in-depth interviews with people in recovery, their family members, treatment providers, and policy makers, Andraka-Christou reveals a troubling landscape characterized by underregulated treatment centers and unnecessary ideological battles between twelve-step support groups and medication providers. The resistance to MAT—from physicians who won't prescribe it, to drug courts that prohibit it, to politicians who overregulate it—showcases the narrow-mindedness of the system and why it isn't working. Recounting the true stories of people in recovery, this groundbreaking book argues that MAT needs to be available to anyone suffering from opioid addiction. Unlike other books about the opioid crisis, which have largely focused on causal factors like pharmaceutical overprescription and heroin trafficking, this book focuses on people who have already developed an opioid addiction but are struggling to find effective treatment. Validating the experience of hundreds of thousands of Americans, The Opioid Fix sounds a loud call for policy reforms that will help put lifesaving drugs into the hands of those who need them the most.
Download or read book Fiscal Therapy written by William G. Gale and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Keeping the economy strong will require addressing two distinct but related problems. Steadily rising federal debt makes it harder to grow our economy, boost our living standards, respond to wars or recessions, address social needs, and maintain our role as a global leader. At the same time, we have let critical investments lag and left many people behind even as overall prosperity has grown. In Fiscal Therapy, William Gale, a leading authority on how federal tax and budget policy affects the economy, provides a trenchant discussion of the challenges posed by the imbalances between spending and revenue. America is facing a gradual decline as debt accumulates and delay raises the costs of action. But there is hope: fiscal responsibility aligns with both conservative and liberal goals and citizens of all stripes can support the notion of making life better for our children and grandchildren. Gale provides a plan to make the economy and nation stronger, one that controls entitlement spending but preserves and enhances their anti-poverty and social insurance roles, increases public investments on human and physical capital, and raises and reforms taxes to pay for government services in a fair and efficient way. What is needed, he argues, is to balance today's needs against tomorrow's obligations. We face significant fiscal challenges but, if we are wise enough to seize our opportunities, we can strengthen our economy, increase opportunity, reduce inequality, and build better lives for our children and grandchildren. We do not have to kill popular programs or starve government. Indeed, one main goal of fiscal reform is to maintain the vital functions that government provides. We need to act responsibly, pay for the government we want, and shape that government in ways that serve us best.
Download or read book The Prosperity Agenda written by Nancy Soderberg and published by Turner Publishing Company. This book was released on 2008-07-01 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following the devastating 2005 earthquake in Pakistan, the Bush administration pledged more than $500 million for earthquake relief and sent American helicopters and soldiers to help. Immediately afterward, polls showed that the number of Pakistanis with a favorable opinion of the United States had doubled to more than 46 percent. The Prosperity Agenda argues that this may be the best foreign policy moment of the entire Bush administration—at the cost of what we spend in Iraq every day—and should become a model for future action. In this provocative, ingenious book, Soderberg and Katulis make one of the most controversial arguments that foreign policy circles have seen in years: no more putting all our eggs in the basket of promoting democracy or market reforms, or even diplomacy, sanctions, or cash handouts to faltering governments. Instead, they argue, we should go right to the citizens of troubled nations and give them what they need most. People in the Congo, Iraq, Pakistan, and North Korea all have the same concerns, and the right to vote is far from the top of the list. They need freedom from war, good food and shelter, basic health care, and the reasonable hope that tomorrow will be better. It's not only the right thing to do; it's likely to do more for American interests than the policies we've been relying on for years. Why have seven years of President Bush's "freedom agenda" failed to achieve freedom or democracy in Iraq, Afghanistan, or anywhere else? When democracy starts to sound like a code word for advancing U.S. interests, it backfires. Latin America provides an excellent example of why freedom's march has stalled, in large part due to quality-of-life issues. A 2004 survey showed that a majority of people in Latin America would rather have a government that provided economic gains than a democracy. The Prosperity Agenda embraces a new and compelling strategy for overcoming that problem and dealing with the world. Giving money, weapons, and loans with lots of strings attached doesn't do it. But handing out vaccines, disaster relief, and $100 laptops does. Working to improve the basic lives of people will, in the end, help defeat terrorism, increase America's leverage against its enemies, weaken dictatorships, and, most importantly, save the lives of millions.
Download or read book Slaying the Dragon The History of Addiction Treatment and Recovery in America written by William L. White and published by . This book was released on 2014-07-01 with total page 558 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is the remarkable story of America's personal and instituional responses to alcoholism and other addictions. It is the story of mutual aid societies: the Washingtonians, the Blue Ribbon Reform Clubs, the Ollapod Club, the United Order of Ex-Boozers, the Jacoby Club, Alcoholics Anonymous and Women for Sobriety. It is a story of addiction treatment institutions from the inebriate asylums and Keeley Institutes to Hazelden and Parkside. It is the story of evolving treatment interventions that range from water cures and mandatory sterilization to aversion therapies and methadone maintenance. William White has provided a sweeping and engaging history of one of America's most enduring problems and the profession that was birthed to respond to it" -- BACK COVER.
Download or read book Killer on the Road written by Ginger Strand and published by Univ of TX + ORM. This book was released on 2012-04-04 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: True crime meets cultural history in this story of how America’s interstate highway system opened a world of mobility and opportunity . . . for serial killers. Starting in the 1950s, Americans eagerly built the planet’s largest public work: the 42,795-mile National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. Before the concrete was dry on the new roads, however, a specter began haunting them: the highway killer. He went by many names: the “Hitcher,” the “Freeway Killer,” the “Killer on the Road,” the “I-5 Strangler,” and the “Beltway Sniper.” Some of these criminals were imagined, but many were real. The nation’s murder rate shot up as its expressways were built. America became more violent and more mobile at the same time. Killer on the Road tells the entwined stories of America’s highways and its highway killers. There’s the hot-rodding juvenile delinquent who led the National Guard on a multistate manhunt; the wannabe highway patrolman who murdered hitchhiking coeds; the record promoter who preyed on “ghetto kids” in a city reshaped by freeways; the nondescript married man who stalked the interstates seeking women with car trouble; and the trucker who delivered death with his cargo. Thudding away behind these grisly crime sprees is the story of the interstates—how they were sold, how they were built, how they reshaped the nation—and how we came to equate them with violence. Through the stories of highway killers, we see how the “killer on the road,” like the train robber, the gangster, and the mobster, entered the cast of American outlaws, and how the freeway—conceived as a road to utopia—came to be feared as a highway to hell. “Strand . . . Explores the connection between America’s sprawling highway system and the pathology of the murderers who have made them a killing ground. . . . The grim stories of murder on the highway may do for road trips what Jaws did for surfing. An interesting detour into a true-crime niche.” ―Kirkus Reviews “Strand’s cross-threaded tales of drifters, stranded motorists, and madmen got its hooks into me. Reading Ms. Strand’s thoughtful book is like driving a Nash Rambler after midnight on a highway to hell.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times “A titillating, clever volume that mixes the sweeping sociological assertions of an urban-studies textbook with the chilling gore of true-crime stories.” —Bookforum “Ginger Strand is in possession of a sharp eye, a biting wit, a beguiling sense of fun—and a magnificent obsession.” —Bloomberg
