This book is, on the face of it, right up my street; and I did enjoy reading it. This is not the first book I've read on the subject, that started with Carmageddon (Daniel Knowles), but what this title does is trace a history of 'Big Car' to explain how we got here. Where we have been lately and, to some extent where we still are, is a bleak, bleak picture that results in health problems for humans as well as for the biosphere on which we depend. Shocking details about road deaths (approaching an average of one a day in Los Angeles alone) and lead contamination in ice cores going back centuries jump off the pages. The book ends, however, with a smorgasbord of morsels of hope from around the world: municipalities and even shopping centuries transforming themselves or being designed to wean us off oil and onto our feet, public transport and pedal power, connecting us with each other and our surroundings.

Clearly well-researched this book moves between fact and journalistic-style opinion writing in a slightly disorientating way: some sections feel quite academic with multiple endnote citations, others are more fast-flowing and informally written (but which leave the reader wondering if some of the claims are those of the writer or are based on research findings). Another minor gripe would be that as a result of the way the book is organised, there is some repetition of material in a way that is more than just referencing forwards or backwards. Nonetheless, I would still recommend this book for anyone interested in learning how we have ended up with such a dangerous and polluting system of private transportation and wants to learn about some of the hopeful indications for the future.