In North America, human beings have become enthralled by the automobile: A quarter of our working lives are spent paying for them;communities fight each other for the right to build more of them; our cities have been torn down, remade and planned with their needs as
the overriding concern; wars are fought to keep their fuel tanks filled;songs are written to praise them; cathedrals are built to worship them. In Stop Signs: Cars and Capitalism on the Road to Economic, Social and Ecological Decay, authors Bianca Mugyenyi and Yves Engler argue that the automobile's ascendance is inextricably linked to Capitalism and involved
corporate malfeasance, political intrigue,backroom payoffs, media manipulation, racism, academic corruption,third world coups, secret armies, environmental destruction and war. An anti-car, road-trip story, Stop Signs is a must-read for all those who wish to escape the clutches of auto domination.
"Mugyenyi and Engler's Stop Signs is at one and the same time an
entertaining, fact-filled anthropological tour of the land of Homo
Automomotivis, and the first all-out global ecological critique of
the American automobile addiction. Not since Jane Holtz Kay's Asphalt
Nation has a book appeared that so clearly exposed the auto-irrationality
of the most car-dependent country on earth." --John Bellamy Foster, editor
of Monthly Review and co-author, The Ecological Rift"
This book is a must read for anyone who wants to understand the impact of
the private automobile on our urban transportation options."-- David
Cadman, Vancouver City Councillor, International President ICLEI-Local
Governments for Sustainability"
In Stop Signs, Mugyenyi and Engler take readers on an
insightful,fact-filled journey through the primary habitat of the
car-dominated species they call Homo automotivis. With wit and
originality, they weave travel tales into a convincing argument against
the autoeconomy, culminating with a fresh call to leave car culture
behind."-- Katie Alvord, Author, Divorce Your Car! Ending the Love Affair
with the Automobile
"Mugyenyi and Engler illustrate the relationship between cars and suburban
living. You come away shaken, but ready to roll up your sleeves and
contribute, however modestly, to constructing a new world in the
twenty-first century." -- Richard Bergeron, Montreal city councilor,
urban planner and author
Yves Engler has been dubbed “one of the most important voices on the
Canadian Left today” (Briarpatch magazine) and “in the mould of I.F.Stone”
(Globe and Mail). His four previous books, including the "Black Book of
Canadian Foreign Policy" have been praised by Noam Chomsky,Naomi Klein,
William Blum and many others.Bianca Mugyenyi was born in Uganda and spent
parts of her youth in Swaziland, Kenya and England. She is the former
chair of the Canadian Federation of Students – Quebec and has been
involved in campaigns ranging from the struggle for accessible education
and reproductive rights to justice for missing and murdered indigenous
women in Canada.She currently coordinates campaigns and programming at
Concordia’s Centre for Gender Advocacy.
For more info and reviews:
http://stopsigns.fairtrademedia.comTo get in touch with the authors: (514)
618-2253
or e-mail:stopsignsbook@gmail.com