Rating: 
Summary: A CHRONICLE OF SOCIAL CHANGE
Review: The Interstate Highway System forever changed American culture, but the engineers who build it were not thinking about that. They were concentrating on accomplishing the biggest building project in the history of the US. Lewis' book is a chronicle of what they built and how it affected the way we live today. In the pages of his book, we meet some of the people who made it happen. They built huge cloverleaf intersections, mighty elevated freeways, and blasted through mountains to join the east coast with the west coast, north with south.The book is interesting reading, but goes off in too many directions, giving only a taste of the social changes wrought by the system and the citizen efforts in urban areas like New Orleans and San Francisco to stop ugly highways. The most surprising thing to me was the miscalculation by the highway designers of the social effects. They somehow thought expressways would bring people INTO cities, not thinking that these massive concrete strips would devastate neighborhoods and make it easier for people to live in the suburbs. Gradually, a nation began to learn that highways are not the answer to all our transportation problems. In my own city -- Detroit -- the building of I-75 tore apart a thriving Hispanic neighborhood in the city, and out in the inner ring suburbs (where I live), a connecting freeway (I-696) was held up for ten years as the tiny municipality of Pleasant Ridge protested the gutting of its small area. In the end, they lost and the highway was built. Today there is a "sound barriar" wall along the freeway, which is down in a ditch, but the constant hum and buzz of the traffic is a steady background noise for the lovely homes that are adjacent to it. Pleasant Ridge is not quite as pleasant as it used to be. It is good to look to the past to avoid repeating costly mistakes, Yes, we need the Interstate Highway System, and we can honor the memory of President Eisenhower who initiated this ambitious and far-reaching program to bring to America "better roads." The engineering accomplishments are stupendous. I personally watched as I-696 was built and marveled how the engineers tunneled under busy Woodward Avenue and never had to close it down; they built the freeway with little disruption of traffic and I remember the day it opened. It was immediately full of traffic, becoming part of an eventual beltway that will ring Detroit, much like Atlanta and Cinncinati have beltways. I am familiar with those because my family has made many trips down I-75 to Florida. How amazing it is to take one road that passes a few miles from my home in Michigan and just stay on that road all the way to the Sunshine State! I think Tom Lewis admirally captures the mixed feelings we all have about these interstates. Ugly and divisive, yes! Engineering marvels that let us travel safely at high speeds over long distances? You bet!
Rating: 
Summary: Entertaining, enlightening and important!
Review: This is the masterpiece that led to the Emmy award winning documentary! A must read!Divided Highways is packed with personal stories and historic markers... read this book and you'll never be bored while driving again. Your entire perspective on the web of roads across America and how they came to be will forever be changed!Highly reccomended!
Rating:
Summary: a less than authoritative survey of the modern highway
Review: Tom Lewis' history of the development of the modern highway in America is something of a bumpy road. The skeletal history of the interstate highway and they way it shaped the American landscape and the American modern is sound, but seems lacking in that it never strives to be a truly insightful analysis of the highway's effect on America and the philosophies and personalities that wrought it. The book is always informative, as the author never hesitates to mention a name or figure, but remains a frustrating read, in that it never successfully explores the current effects of the interstate in modern America, especially on an emotional or psychological level. Mr. Lewis remains impartial throughout, and perhaps this is why a more opinionated investigation on the future of highway culture is left to the reader.
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