A Brief History of Motion, Tom Standage
A Brief History of Motion, Tom Standage
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A Brief History of Motion
From the Wheel, to the Car, to What Comes Next

Author: Tom Standage

Narrator: Liam Gerrard

Unabridged: 8 hr 19 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 08/17/2021


Synopsis

Tom Standage's fleet-footed and surprising global histories have delighted fans and sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Now, he returns with a provocative account of an overlooked form of technology-personal transportation-and explores how it has shaped societies and cultures over millennia.

Beginning around 3,500 BCE with the wheel—a device that didn't catch on until a couple thousand years after its invention—Standage zips through the eras of horsepower, trains, and bicycles, revealing how each successive mode of transit embedded itself in the world we live in, from the geography of our cities to our experience of time to our notions of gender. Standage explores the social resistance to cars and the upheaval that their widespread adoption required. Cars changed how the world was administered, laid out, and policed, how it looked, sounded, and smelled—and not always in the ways we might have preferred.

Today—after the explosive growth of ride-sharing and years of breathless predictions about autonomous vehicles—the social transformations spurred by coronavirus and overshadowed by climate change create a unique opportunity to critically reexamine our relationship to the car. With A Brief History of Motion, Standage overturns myths and invites us to look at our past with fresh eyes so we can create the future we want to see.

About Tom Standage

Tom Standage is digital editor at the Economist and editor-in-chief of its website, economist.com. He is the author of six history books, including An Edible History of Humanity, the New York Times bestseller A History of the World in Six Glasses, and The Victorian Internet. His writing has also appeared in the Daily Telegraph, the New York Times, and Wired. He lives in London.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Tomas on January 06, 2022

Výborné, ak vás len trochu zaujíma doprava a to, ako formuje naše prostredie a mestá. Z časti história, z menšej časti bleskový prehľad, aký je dnešný stav a kam jednotlivé línie rozvoja (elektrické autá, autonómia..) smerujú. Veľa vtipných "veď to bolo presne ako dnes!" momentov, dozviete sa, ako t......more

Goodreads review by Jeff on July 01, 2021

Interesting Overview. Needs Bibliography. It is actually somewhat interesting to me that of five reviews on Goodreads prior to this one, one of the reviewers specifically notes a lack of footnotes as a *good* thing... and this very thing is actually pretty well the only thing I could find to *ding*......more

Goodreads review by Brandon on December 28, 2021

A great pairing of another book I just read, Green Metropolis by David Owen. Both books question the hard assumption that cars are simply givens in our society. In fact, as Standage explores in this book, they are products of technology and commerce, spanning thousands of years back but only recentl......more

Goodreads review by Sajith on January 06, 2022

Transportation of men and material from one location to another in a fast and efficient manner is an indicator of civilizational progress when taken over a large interval of time. I insist on having the disclaimer on time because in most cities and urban landscapes of the world, transportation speed......more

Goodreads review by Bandit on June 09, 2021

An excellent, edifying, erudite primer that wheels and deals in information on all things motion related. In the beginning there was a wheel and, surprisingly enough, it wasn’t all that popular at first. Then it became all the rage and got a companion wheel. Enter cart (or a chariot if you’re fancy......more