Divided Highways: Building the Interstate Highways, Transforming American Life | 
 enlarge | Author: Tom Lewis
Publisher: Viking Adult
Category: Book
List Price: $27.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  11 reviews
Sales Rank: 717557
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 352
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.2
ISBN: 067086627X
Dewey Decimal Number: 388.1220973
EAN: 9780670866274
ASIN: 067086627X
Publication Date: October 1, 1997
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com
Picture a field of dirt, piled knee high, that covers an area the size of Connecticut, or imagine a concrete sidewalk extending a million miles into space. You will have envisioned, Tom Lewis tells us, the amount of earth moved and the amount of concrete poured to make America's interstate highway system, a network of roads planned far back in the 19th century but completed only a few years ago. The public's view of the interstate system, Lewis writes, has been colored in recent decades by the grim realities of gridlock, smog, and road rage. In their early years, however, these highways seemed to promise the freedom of the open road, a gateway to faraway coasts. Lewis does a fine job of conveying the grandeur of the project, the largest work of civil construction ever undertaken by a democratic power. Lewis's narrative is peopled with largely unknown figures, among them the little-heralded but critically important engineer Harris MacDonald. MacDonald turned the federal Bureau of Public Roads into a powerful force of social as well as physical engineering and paved the way for the large-scale projects of the Roosevelt and Eisenhower administrations. Lewis, a well-traveled explorer on the byways of technological progress, extends his history well into the past. He describes the building of the first national and post roads, the great parkways that connected such far-flung cities as Winnipeg and Miami, the once rural roads that, over the decades, blossomed into multilane highways--a process that has always depended on what Lewis calls "Americans' faith in technocracy" and their will to shape the future, acre by acre. --Gregory McNamee
Book Description
What do Levittown, the 1939 World's Fair, and the Model T have in common? To what invention can the existence of suburban sprawl, toll booths, mall shopping, an oil-obsessed foreign policy, fast food, and air and noise pollution be attributed? The interstate highway. This landmark enterprise of the 1950s literally changed the face of America for eternity. In 1919, Dwight D. Eisenhower needed sixty-two days to travel from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco. Now, eighty years and 42,500 miles of paved roads later, the trip can be made in less than seventy-two hours. Divided Highways is the fascinating history behind the efforts to make cement trails across America, told through the stories of the people who dreamed up, mapped out, paved-and even tried to stop-the interstate highways. Popular historian Tom Lewis details "man's triumph over nature" in an engaging, sweeping style. Award-winning film director Ken Burns says: "He tells the story of how we get from point A to point B in America. And just as our lives should be, Lewis makes the journey more interesting and meaningful than the destination." * Basis of the 1997 Peabody Award-winning PBS documentary.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 6 more reviews...
 How much money do they spend on highway signage? January 28, 2008
Ah, Tom Lewis, informing readers that our highway signs are green because of some tests done in Maryland. They were, amazingly, almost black, until a) drivers didn't like black, and b) the proponent of the darkness was found to colorblind.
It's this kind of minutiae that makes Divided Highways a worthwhile read.
The book has a long range, spanning the Important Parts of this nation's history since WW2, giving it somewhat of a watered-down feel. It devolves from a neat history of the politics of roadbuilding to a collection of fairly standard social commentaries once the roads actually start getting built.
Maps would've helped, as it'd be easier to understand the plight of, for example, Saratoga Springs, had I been able to visualize what the interstate had done to the once-touristy city.
Despite these knocks, thank you, Mr. Lewis, for a splendid read.
 the american highway system; the pbs version October 1, 2007
Too bad I only read one book every couple of weeks. Lewis's "Divided History" is somewhere in between a conventional history of the building of the interstate highway's in the United States and a journalistic account of the builiding of the interstate highway's in the United States. Either way you want to slice it- that's nearly three hundred pages on the building of interstate highway's in the United States. It's a boring book- not just because the subject matter itself, but also because Mr. Lewis has apparently never been west of Denver. Aside from a brief two page write up on the 15 running through Vegas, you would think that the "Interstate Highway System" extends from the Northeast to the Midwest and stops.
I pride myself on not needing a highway to get to or from work, but take perverse pride in living less then two hundred feet from Interstate 5. The interstate system and southern california material culture are intextricably intertwined, though the move to the "freeway" system in Southern California predated the national, federally funded "interstate" system by a couple of decades.
Mostly, I learned from this book that once it got rolling, the Interstate highway project was as formidable a behemoth as the "new deal" ever produced. Ironically the interstate project (and by "interstate highway project" I am referring to the massive federal spending program that was literally entirely responsible for the construction of the interstates everywhere in the United States) was initiated not by Franklin Roosevelt, but by Dwight Eisenhower, who had a sick bed conversion to the cause whilst recooperating from a little light surgery.
Along the way, the Interstate highway project gave sustenance to a generation of civil engineers and bureaucrats (or "technocrats" as Lewis enjoys calling them). There is little to commend this book to the everyday reader- unless that everyday reader is as infatuated with the interstate highway system
A "lobby" without the name February 9, 2004
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
For me, one of the interesting things in this very interesting book is how Lewis describes the development of the "highway lobby," under the aegis of the Federal Bureau of Roads, without ever (I believe) calling it a lobby. This is certainly not the main focus of the book, but Lewis makes it clear that the highway system would not have been developed without the efforts of the highway lobby.
Informative, with too much opinion October 21, 2002
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
Mr. Lewis offers an insightful view to the history of the interstate system in the United States. While the first half of the book is a wonderfully interesting read, I think that the second half of the book becomes bogged down with too much of Lewis's opinion. I agree with his point that the interstate has changed the state of America for the worse; however, his argument would be better served by a factual analysis from which the reader could draw his or her own conclusions, rather than trying to lead us down the path to highway hatred.
A CHRONICLE OF SOCIAL CHANGE August 16, 2001
7 out of 9 found this review helpful
The Interstate Highway System forever changed American culture, but the engineers who build it were not thinking about that. They were concentrating on accomplishing the biggest building project in the history of the US. Lewis' book is a chronicle of what they built and how it affected the way we live today. In the pages of his book, we meet some of the people who made it happen. They built huge cloverleaf intersections, mighty elevated freeways, and blasted through mountains to join the east coast with the west coast, north with south.The book is interesting reading, but goes off in too many directions, giving only a taste of the social changes wrought by the system and the citizen efforts in urban areas like New Orleans and San Francisco to stop ugly highways. The most surprising thing to me was the miscalculation by the highway designers of the social effects. They somehow thought expressways would bring people INTO cities, not thinking that these massive concrete strips would devastate neighborhoods and make it easier for people to live in the suburbs. Gradually, a nation began to learn that highways are not the answer to all our transportation problems. In my own city -- Detroit -- the building of I-75 tore apart a thriving Hispanic neighborhood in the city, and out in the inner ring suburbs (where I live), a connecting freeway (I-696) was held up for ten years as the tiny municipality of Pleasant Ridge protested the gutting of its small area. In the end, they lost and the highway was built. Today there is a "sound barriar" wall along the freeway, which is down in a ditch, but the constant hum and buzz of the traffic is a steady background noise for the lovely homes that are adjacent to it. Pleasant Ridge is not quite as pleasant as it used to be. It is good to look to the past to avoid repeating costly mistakes, Yes, we need the Interstate Highway System, and we can honor the memory of President Eisenhower who initiated this ambitious and far-reaching program to bring to America "better roads." The engineering accomplishments are stupendous. I personally watched as I-696 was built and marveled how the engineers tunneled under busy Woodward Avenue and never had to close it down; they built the freeway with little disruption of traffic and I remember the day it opened. It was immediately full of traffic, becoming part of an eventual beltway that will ring Detroit, much like Atlanta and Cinncinati have beltways. I am familiar with those because my family has made many trips down I-75 to Florida. How amazing it is to take one road that passes a few miles from my home in Michigan and just stay on that road all the way to the Sunshine State! I think Tom Lewis admirally captures the mixed feelings we all have about these interstates. Ugly and divisive, yes! Engineering marvels that let us travel safely at high speeds over long distances? You bet!
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