Divorce Your Car! : Ending the Love Affair with the Automobile | 
 enlarge | Author: Katie Alvord
Publisher: New Society Publishers
Category: Book
List Price: $17.95
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You Save: $15.95 (89%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  15 reviews
Sales Rank: 341788
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9 x 6.1 x 0.8
ISBN: 0865714088
Dewey Decimal Number: 388.342
EAN: 9780865714083
ASIN: 0865714088
Publication Date: June 1, 2000
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Condition: Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. 100% Money Back Guarantee.
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
Alvord's perceptive gloss of the late, great, 20th century's pitiful auto intoxication is a fascinating read and a stunning contradiction of the fatuity that technology is neutral. Her gathering of stories illuminates the existence of a vital planet-wide, counter-car-culture. Witty, substantial and penetrating, Divorce Your Car! is a mighty persuasive job of work.?Stephanie Mills, from the Foreword
Our romance with cars, begun with enthusiasm more than 100 years ago, has in fact become a very troubled entanglement. Today's relationship with the automobile inflicts upon us pollution, noise, congestion, sprawl, big expenses, injury, and even death. Yet we continue to live with cars at a growing cost to ourselves and the environment.
What can people do about this souring affair? Divorce your car! Re-meet your feet, board a bike, take a train, pull out of this dysfunctional relationship with the automobile! Divorcing your car can take many forms, from simply using it less to not owning one at all. This practical guide shows how divorcing a car can be fun, healthy, money-saving, and helpful to the planet in the process.
Most other transportation reform books emphasize long-range political and economic policy. Divorce Your Car! speaks less about policy and more about realistic actions that individuals can take now to reduce their car-dependence. It encourages readers to change their own driving behavior without waiting for broader social change, stressing that individual action can drive social change.
Car-dependency is a serious problem, but Divorce Your Car! is leavened with love-affair and self-help analogies in the text as well as cartoon illustrations. From commuters crazed by congestion and soccer moms sick of chauffeuring, to environmentalists looking for auto alternatives?Divorce Your Car! provides all the reasons not to drive and the many alternative ways we can all get around without our cars.
Table of Contents
Introduction
PART 1: LOVE'S BEEN BLIND: HOW WE ENDED UP MARRIED TO CARS
1: Falling Head Over Wheels: The Advent of Cars
2: Other Suitors Drop by the Wayside: The Decline of Non-Car Transport
3: The Possessive Auto Takes Over the Lands
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| Customer Reviews: Read 10 more reviews...
 repetitive but good December 10, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book did a great job providing a brief early history of the car and illustrating the problems with them. The chapter on how to do without your car was informative and well researched but very repetitive.
Good Stuff September 28, 2005
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
I'm moving out of state next year and won't be taking my car with me. Life will probably be more difficult in some ways but it's worth it. When you read about cars and study about them and think about them, it's really unbelievable the amount of death, destruction, and suffering that they've caused over the last hundred years. I've read a lot of anti-car books and this is one of the better ones. It's very thorough while not being too dry or academic like some of the others. Read this book and you'll learn things that will surprise you, like how much money it really costs a society when it uses cars as its main form of transportation. And don't forget perhaps the greatest tragedy of all. Cars gave rise to one of the lowest forms of life that the human race has ever known - the car salesman!
A great book! December 8, 2004
3 out of 5 found this review helpful
This book inspired me to bite the bullet and become car-lite (I live a little too far from town to achieve car-free just yet). It has a lot of exciting examples of how being car-free and car-lite can lead to a more pleasant lifestyle, as well as motivation why it's a good thing to do. Katie's own example is also inspiring, as she has significantly reduced car usage while living in a rural area in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, a place with legendary winters. Now when I get whiny about putting on my rain suit in the winter here in Northern California and want to jump in my car instead of riding, I think about Katie and her husband biking in the snow of the U.P.
 Methodical outline of problems and solutions August 4, 2004
5 out of 7 found this review helpful
Divorce Your Car, by Katie Alvord, is thought provoking. In the United States of America, an automobile is many things to many people: transportation, status symbol, hobby, money pit. Alvord takes apart the place of the car in modern society (the focus of the book is on North America, though she does refer to Europe and the Third World in places) and roundly condemns our dependence.
Her book is split into three parts--the first covers the history of the automobile and other forms of transport. She legitimizes what I'd often heard and dismissed as a myth--the car industry bought up the transit systems of cities in the US early in the 20th century and replaced them with buses. The second is a laundry list of the negative effects of the car (which, I must confess, I didn't finish--too depressed after the first thirty pages). The final section covers alternatives, including walking, biking, mass transit, non-gasoline cars, and telecommuting.
I found the book to be quite good in outlining the problem and highlighting solutions. The dependence of modern life on the car is a dependence on convenience. But, to some extent, it's a matter of inertia. Automobiles are so prevalent and easy that many of us never try the alternatives, let alone use them in preference to our car. A strong point is that she realizes that car-free living isn't for anyone, and makes a point that going car-lite can have a positive effect as well. She also touches on the far reaching implications that technology decisions have had on our society, our cities and our lives--from subsidies to the development of advertising. It would have been interesting to read more about that, but what she did say was definitely thought provoking.
However, I do have three quibbles. Alvord cites sources extensively, but her arguments would be more compelling were the sources less biased (as you can tell by titles like Asphalt Nation) and more first hand. She ignores two factors that would affect my divorce. Giving up your car, or at the very least being aware of alternatives, makes drunk driving less likely--a good thing! On the other hand, if you don't have a car, you suddenly have a dearth of available camping and hiking activities. But these concerns aren't everyone's, to be sure.
Overall, a book well worth reading, especially if you commute a lot. Too bad they don't sell it as a book on tape!
Save Time, Money & the Environment--Divorce Your Car! April 21, 2004
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
Alvord makes a very convincing argument for divorcing your car. So convincing, in fact, that my husband and I will likely divorce our one and only car in the coming months.Divorce Your Car explains the obvious--how divorcing your car will save money and help protect the environment. More intriguing, though, is the explanation of how divorcing your car will actually save you time. How can divorcing your car save time, you wonder? Alvord factors in not just how long it takes to get somewhere (by car versus by other modes of transit), but also how much time you have to spend working to pay for all the costs associated with a car. When all is said and done, the car doesn't move any faster than a bike. While Alvord does mention that walking and biking instead of driving have health benefits, her calculations of time don't include another big factor working against the car--making time for exercise. Many people complain that they don't have "time" for exercise. I used to complain about this too. But now that I bike virtually every day, making time for exercise is a non-issue. It may take me 20 minutes to bike somewhere I could get to by car in 10 minutes, and ditto for the return trip. But if I had to find another 40 minutes each day to exercise (plus time to drive to and from the gym!)...geez, no wonder I didn't used to have time to exercise. By ditching the car, you can save enough money to work less (Alvord has some inspiring examples) and easily work exercise into your daily routine. As an added perk, you even get to help save the planet. What's not to like!
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