Reviews
Consuming Landscapes is an excellent, well-written and well-researched book that makes clear the centrality of roads to our lives and the history of how they got there.
Zeller's book is provocative, entertaining, and informative.... Any student of the history of road transportation in North America and Europe will not be disappointed if they spend a few hours with this book.
In offering an entangled, comparative history of trans-Atlantic roadmindedness across the twentieth century, Thomas Zeller has artfully worked across disciplines and historiographical subfields to, as the book's subtitle promises, historicise 'what we see when we drive and why it matters'.
A valuable contribution to the history of the constructed experience of driving.
I have learnt hugely from this book, in particular the increasing involvement of promoters and, increasingly, environmentalists who had their scepticisms.
A strikingly original, international analysis of roadmindedness, of landscape ordered into scenery by roads designed to shape motorist aesthetic experience. This book will inaugurate a new era in landscape studies, but it is also an original contribution to social, engineering, and business history.
Profoundly researched and beautifully written. The flow and pacing of the author's prose unfolds like a scenic drive itself. Acutely aware of visuality and of the verticality and horizontality of space in the construction of some of the first scenic park- and motorways, Zeller elegantly weaves together the histories of transportation, mobility, landscape, and the environment.
In this well-illustrated, trailblazing work, Thomas Zeller tours the managed vistas of mid-twentieth century highway engineers. The Blue Ridge Parkway or German Alpine Road provided not rapid travel but transformative experiences of scenery. Construction demanded social control, yet modernist driving aesthetics prized challenges, deceleration, uncertainty, and surprise. Fasten your seatbelt!
Thomas Zeller has written an important and imaginative book about "roadmindedness" and the forms it took in Germany and the US during the 1930s. Elegantly written and superbly illustrated, Consuming Landscapes offers major insights into the relationship between humans, technology, and the environment. I strongly recommend this compelling work.
Book Details
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction. Cars and Roads as Environmental Saviors
Chapter 1. Roads to Nature
Chapter 2. Roads to Power
Chapter 3. Roads in Place
Chapter 4. Roads out of Place
Epilog
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction. Cars and Roads as Environmental Saviors
Chapter 1. Roads to Nature
Chapter 2. Roads to Power
Chapter 3. Roads in Place
Chapter 4. Roads out of Place
Epilogue. Landscape Taken for a Ride?
Notes
Bibliography
Index