Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
6,409,195
result(s) for
"AUTOMOBILE"
Sort by:
The Socialist Car
Across the Soviet Bloc, from the 1960s until the collapse of communism, the automobile exemplified the tension between the ideological imperatives of political authorities and the aspirations of ordinary citizens. For the latter, the automobile was the ticket to personal freedom and a piece of the imagined consumer paradise of the West. For the authorities, the personal car was a private, mobile space that challenged the most basic assumptions of the collectivity. The \"socialist car\"-and the car culture that built up around it-was the result of an always unstable compromise between official ideology, available resources, and the desires of an increasingly restless citizenry. InThe Socialist Car, eleven scholars from Europe and North America explore in vivid detail the interface between the motorcar and the state socialist countries of Eastern Europe, including the USSR.
In addition to the metal, glass, upholstery, and plastic from which the Ladas, Dacias, Trabants, and other still extant but aging models were fabricated, the socialist car embodied East Europeans' longings and compromises, hopes and disappointments. The socialist car represented both aspirations of overcoming the technological gap between the capitalist first and socialist second worlds and dreams of enhancing personal mobility and status. Certain features of automobility-shortages and privileges, waiting lists and lack of readily available credit, the inadequacy of streets and highways-prevailed across the Soviet Bloc. In this collective history, the authors put aside both ridicule and nostalgia in the interest of trying to understand the socialist car in its own context.
Contributors: Elke Beyer, Swiss Institute of Technology; Valentina Fava, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies and University of Helsinki; Luminita Gatejel, European University Institute, Florence; Mariusz Jastrzab, Kozminski University; Corinna Kuhr-Korolev, University of Bochum; Brigitte Le Normand, Indiana University Southeast; Esther Meier, University of the Federal Armed Forces, Hamburg; Kurt Möser, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology; György Péteri, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim; Eli Rubin, Western Michigan University; Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Michigan State University
eBook
Atlantic automobilism
Our continued use of the combustion engine car in the 21st century, despite many rational arguments against it, makes it more and more difficult to imagine that transport has a sustainable future. Offering a sweeping transatlantic perspective, this book explains the current obsession with automobiles by delving deep into the motives of early car users. It provides a synthesis of our knowledge about the emergence and persistence of the car, using a broad range of material including novels, poems, films, and songs to unearth the desires that shaped our present \"car society.\" Combining social, psychological, and structural explanations, the author concludes that the ability of cars to convey transcendental experience, especially for men, explains our attachment to the vehicle.
eBook
The psychology of the car : automobile admiration, attachment, and addiction
The Psychology of the Car explores automotive cultures through the lens of psychology with the goal of achieving a low-carbon transport future.Worldwide there are now more than one billion cars, and their number grows continuously.
eBook
Modeling and control of engines and drivelines
Control systems have come to play an important role in the performance of modern vehicles with regards to meeting goals on low emissions and low fuel consumption. To achieve these goals, modeling, simulation, and analysis have become standard tools for the development of control systems in the automotive industry.
eBook
The Cultural Life of the Automobile
From its invention in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, the automobile crisscrossed the world, completely took over the cities, and became a feature of daily life. Considered basic to the American lifestyle, the car reflected individualism, pragmatism, comfort, and above all modernity. In Latin America, it served as a symbol of distinction, similar to jewelry or fine clothing. In The Cultural Life of the Automobile, Guillermo Giucci focuses on the automobile as an instrument of social change through its “kinetic modernity\" and as an embodiment of the tremendous social impact of technology on cultural life. Material culture—how certain objects generate a wide array of cultural responses—has been the focus of much scholarly discussion in recent years. The automobile wrought major changes and inspired images in language, literature, and popular culture. Focusing primarily on Latin America but also covering the United States, Europe, Asia, and Africa, Giucci examines how the automobile was variously adapted by different cultures and how its use shaped and changed social and economic relationships within them. At the same time, he shows how the “automobilization\" of society became an essential support for the development of modern individualism, and the automobile its clearest material manifestation.
eBook