Most any honest person, no matter how refined the palate or how anointed the social status, can own up to harboring at least one fast-food guilty pleasure. One item against which their resistance is useless and their fealty is set. We tend to think of fast food as corporate and impersonal. And for good reason. But, in unexpected ways, fast food is also deeply personal. After all, the only inherited rite in America might just be mainlining French fries beneath the comforting fluorescence of an anonymous fast-food dining room. Drive-Thru Dreams by Adam Chandler tells the personal and contemporary story of America, its innovations and failures, its international charisma, and its regional identities through its beloved roadside fare. Fast food's menus, mass appeal, and blue-collar roots, offer a reflection of a century of national life explained by American habits, desires, economic realities, and political identities. We are all too familiar with the dark underbelly of the fast-food kingdom, but it is also symbolic of what we mean to be: democratic, efficient, and accessible to the masses. A sharp contrast to Super Size Me and Fast Food Nation, Chandler's insightful and hilarious cultural study with Drive-Thru Dreams shows that the fast-food industry, though imperfect, reflects much of what makes us Americans.

If Chuck Klosterman of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs were to take on the fast-food industry and its inextricable link to American nostalgia throughout the 20th and 21th centuries

About the Author
Adam Chandler is a writer and journalist based in Brooklyn. A former staff writer at The Atlantic and Tablet Magazine, his work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Texas Monthly, New York Magazine, Slate, Esquire, and elsewhere.


Book Information
ISBN 9781250090744
Author Adam Chandler
Format Paperback
Page Count 288
Imprint Flatiron Books
Publisher Flatiron Books
Weight(grams) 247g
Dimensions(mm) 203mm * 128mm * 20mm