Drive: journeys through film, cities and landscapes - 44314

Drive: Automobile Journeys through Film, Cities and Landscapes explores the experience of driving cars as a way of encountering landscapes and cities around the world.

A widespread and richly illustrated cultural history, drawing on social and urban history, art, literature and music, Drive explores in particular how automobile driving is portrayed in cinema and other moving-images, from America to Europe and Asia, and from Hollywood to the avant-garde.

Drive moves quickly from the deserts of The Grapes of Wrath to the adventurous city streets of The Italian Job, from the aesthetic delights of Rain Man and Trafic to the existential musings of Two-Lane Blacktop, Thelma and Louise and Vanishing Point, from the contemplative freeway pleasures of Lift to the Scaffold, Radio On and London Orbital to the hallucinatory high-speed dangers of Crash, Bullitt, Death Proof and C'etait un Rendezvous.

It is book about dynamic journeys, experiences and speeds, rooted in specific places and roads, and expanded into the realm of cinema, art and video games.

Covering over a century of history, and with reference to hundreds of different movies, Drive shows how various kinds of driving - with different speeds, cars, attitudes, roads and cities - provides experiences and values which we ignore at our peril.

Its conclusion - that car driving is an integral and essential part of our modern-day life, and therefore something to be celebrated and perhaps even encouraged - is a timely riposte to those anti-car attitudes which are too often blinkered to the richness of car driving.