Customer Reviews

Divided Highways: Building the Interstate Highways, Transforming American Life

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
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Mr. Lewis' book is an interesting narrative of the building of the interstate highway system. His depictions of the stories leading to the building of the system are interesting and informative, although he spends quite a bit of time (almost too much) background on some of the early players. More examples such as the New Orleans narrative, would have been interesting, such as an in-depth history of the battle for the DC inner beltway. Overall, the book is very good, but a bit slow and heavy in person narratives at times.

Mr. Lewis offers an insightful view to the history of the interstate system in the United States. While the first half of the book is a wonderfully interesting read, I think that the second half of the book becomes bogged down with too much of Lewis's opinion. I agree with his point that the interstate has changed the state of America for the worse; however, his argument would be better served by a factual analysis from which the reader could draw his or her own conclusions, rather than trying to lead us down the path to highway hatred.

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!

I would like to note that while Kirkus Reviews claims "Lewis is not always careful with his facts (e.g., the first enclosed shopping mall was built in 1956, not in 1947...)," they themselves begin their review with a blatant falsehood: "Similar to his Empire of the Air: The Men Who Made Radio, Lewis has written a tie-in to a PBS documentary." Neither Empire of the Air nor Divided Highways are "tie-in" books. The films are based on the books, not vice-versa, and Kirkus Reviews should know better. Interestingly enough, the first enclosed shopping mall was actually built in 1947, as Lewis wrote. Two strikes for Kirkus! Buy this book!

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!

Ah, Tom Lewis, informing readers that our highway signs are green because of some tests done in Maryland. They were, amazingly, almost black, until a) drivers didn't like black, and b) the proponent of the darkness was found to colorblind.

It's this kind of minutiae that makes Divided Highways a worthwhile read.

The book has a long range, spanning the Important Parts of this nation's history since WW2, giving it somewhat of a watered-down feel. It devolves from a neat history of the politics of roadbuilding to a collection of fairly standard social commentaries once the roads actually start getting built.

Maps would've helped, as it'd be easier to understand the plight of, for example, Saratoga Springs, had I been able to visualize what the interstate had done to the once-touristy city.

Despite these knocks, thank you, Mr. Lewis, for a splendid read.

Too bad I only read one book every couple of weeks. Lewis's "Divided History" is somewhere in between a conventional history of the building of the interstate highway's in the United States and a journalistic account of the builiding of the interstate highway's in the United States. Either way you want to slice it- that's nearly three hundred pages on the building of interstate highway's in the United States. It's a boring book- not just because the subject matter itself, but also because Mr. Lewis has apparently never been west of Denver. Aside from a brief two page write up on the 15 running through Vegas, you would think that the "Interstate Highway System" extends from the Northeast to the Midwest and stops.

I pride myself on not needing a highway to get to or from work, but take perverse pride in living less then two hundred feet from Interstate 5. The interstate system and southern california material culture are intextricably intertwined, though the move to the "freeway" system in Southern California predated the national, federally funded "interstate" system by a couple of decades.

Mostly, I learned from this book that once it got rolling, the Interstate highway project was as formidable a behemoth as the "new deal" ever produced. Ironically the interstate project (and by "interstate highway project" I am referring to the massive federal spending program that was literally entirely responsible for the construction of the interstates everywhere in the United States) was initiated not by Franklin Roosevelt, but by Dwight Eisenhower, who had a sick bed conversion to the cause whilst recooperating from a little light surgery.

Along the way, the Interstate highway project gave sustenance to a generation of civil engineers and bureaucrats (or "technocrats" as Lewis enjoys calling them). There is little to commend this book to the everyday reader- unless that everyday reader is as infatuated with the interstate highway system

A great overview of the politics and logistics behind the world's largest public works project. A lively story.

Divided Highways is a companion to a PBS history series, with all the problems of that genre. It's painfully overwritten, obsessed with old photos, and treats history as a succession of disconnected facts rather than a coherent story. But worst of all is its blind insistence that America can do no wrong. Just as a bad biographer tries to hide his subject's flaws, Lewis goes out of his way to ignore any of the intrigue involved in building highways -- and heaps scorn upon anyone who would dare to disagree.

The interstate highway system was one of the biggest government projects ever undertaken. It directed hundreds of billions of dollars to state government, construction companies, manufacturers, makers of paint and steel, and so on. It dramatically increased sales of cars and tires and gas. It vastly multiplied the value of land near its exits. To believe that such a project was conceived, legislated, and implemented without corruption defies belief. Yet Lewis insists any suggestion otherwise is a "conspiracy theory".

Incredibly, he does this while providing endless evidence of such conspiracies. There's the secretive Road Gang of highway beneficiaries, the GM-Firestone conspiracy to buy up and destroy the nation's trollies, the network of lobbyists that connected federal officials with congressmen and corporations, the corporate executives hired to write the whole plan in the first place.

Yet Lewis never dedicates more than a couple sentences to each of these, usually just to mock those who see them as evidence of some sinister plot. In purging his story of any corruption or conflict or intrigue, he purges it of any interest.

Try Stephen Goddard's Getting There instead.

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.