Description
On the road to Survival City, Tom Vanderbilt maps the visible and invisible legacies of the cold war, exhuming the blueprints for the apocalypse we once envisioned and chronicling a time in which we all lived at ground zero. In this road trip among ruined missile silos, atomic storage bunkers, and secret test sites, a lost battleground emerges amid the architecture of the 1950s, accompanied by Walter Cotten's stunning photographs. "Survival City" looks deep into the national soul, unearthing the dreams and fears that drove us during the latter half of the twentieth century.
About the Author
Tom Vanderbilt is the New York Times best-selling author of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us). His work on design, technology, science, and culture has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Nation, London Review of Books, Wall Street Journal, and others.
Reviews
"A genuinely engaging book, perhaps because Vanderbilt is skillful at conveying his own sense of engagement to the reader." - Los Angeles Times "A retracing of Dr. Strangelove as ordinary life." - Greil Marcus, Bookforum "A fascinating political and cultural analysis of 'cold war architecture': a vast array of structures from missile silos to small towns built to test the effectiveness of an atomic blast, presidential fallout shelters, nuclear waste dumps, monoliths like the windowless PacBell building in Los Angeles, and countless motels and diners named 'Atomic.'" - Publishers Weekly "Exploring buried traces of the cold war in America... Vanderbilt finds a vast, secret, and now largely abandoned landscape." - Architecture "Survival City, by taking us on a tour of important places we've probably never seen, is both a call to preserve cold war history and a valuable reminder of the continual impact of nuclear weapons on the American cultural and physical landscape." - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists "This is a crucial and dazzling book. Masterful, and for me at least, intoxicating. It reminds us of the absurd and sinister ways humans have attempted to ensure their survival, and, without ever oversimplifying, it manages to be a ridiculously entertaining read." - Dave Eggers.
Book Information
ISBN 9780226846941
Author Tom Vanderbilt
Format Paperback
Page Count 240
Imprint University of Chicago Press
Publisher The University of Chicago Press
Weight(grams) 369g
Dimensions(mm) 24mm * 15mm * 1mm
About the Author
Tom Vanderbilt is the New York Times best-selling author of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us). His work on design, technology, science, and culture has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Nation, London Review of Books, Wall Street Journal, and others.
Reviews
"A genuinely engaging book, perhaps because Vanderbilt is skillful at conveying his own sense of engagement to the reader." - Los Angeles Times "A retracing of Dr. Strangelove as ordinary life." - Greil Marcus, Bookforum "A fascinating political and cultural analysis of 'cold war architecture': a vast array of structures from missile silos to small towns built to test the effectiveness of an atomic blast, presidential fallout shelters, nuclear waste dumps, monoliths like the windowless PacBell building in Los Angeles, and countless motels and diners named 'Atomic.'" - Publishers Weekly "Exploring buried traces of the cold war in America... Vanderbilt finds a vast, secret, and now largely abandoned landscape." - Architecture "Survival City, by taking us on a tour of important places we've probably never seen, is both a call to preserve cold war history and a valuable reminder of the continual impact of nuclear weapons on the American cultural and physical landscape." - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists "This is a crucial and dazzling book. Masterful, and for me at least, intoxicating. It reminds us of the absurd and sinister ways humans have attempted to ensure their survival, and, without ever oversimplifying, it manages to be a ridiculously entertaining read." - Dave Eggers.
Book Information
ISBN 9780226846941
Author Tom Vanderbilt
Format Paperback
Page Count 240
Imprint University of Chicago Press
Publisher The University of Chicago Press
Weight(grams) 369g
Dimensions(mm) 24mm * 15mm * 1mm
