Driving Forces: The Automobile, Its Enemies and the Politics of Mobility Book

This book was mentioned on NPR and because the author explored roads in places where or near where we had been, I wanted to read it. His premise is about the power of roads to change the world- sometimes in good ways and sometimes in bad ones. In Peru he traveled with loggers who were denuding mahogany in Amazonia and brining it over the Andes to sell. In East Africa, he went with truckers. It is assumed that truckers had brought aids to towns along the routes when they visited whores. He also went into a remote part of the Himalayas in India and walked on ice an impending route to judge how it would affect the culture there. The toughest parts to read however, were visits to both Israeli and Palestine natives. The Israeli side has young soldiers who are bored but have to man check points. The Palestinian people he visited are constantly harrassed and in fear and unable to work because of the check point, both the ones that are always manned and those that are set up all of a sudden in a temporary manner. I truly felt that our pledges to Isreal are supporting an unfair situation. The final segment was to Lagos, Nigeria a place of poor and oil rich that sounds like road traffic may be the worst in the worl.