Driving Ambitions: An Analysis of the American Hot Rod Enthusiasm by H. F. Moorhouse

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TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 419 Smith’s triumph over Pocahontas’s people. Rescued from death by the Native American woman, Smith dazzles the natives with his compass and frightens them with cannon fire. Englishmen, Wright appears to imply, are the knowledgeable enthusiasts; Native American women and men the ignorant technophobes. And yet, if they cared nothing for technology, why did the Native Americans even bother to look at the compass? Smith fired his cannons, Wright tells us, because natives “were carrying millstones away from the English camp.” Why, 1 wonder, would they bother? I suspect that the relation between technology and white, middleclass masculinity goes a step further than these essays have taken it, so deep that the tools and techniques associated with femininity and women, with people of color and poor people, are identified as in some sense not technology. Is cooking an act of technological mastery? Is The Joy of Cooking a how-to book? Did Native Americans have a technological use for those millstones? I would like to know more about enthusiasm for technology on the part of the outsiders all these scientists, engineers, colonialist adventurers, magazine writers, soap­ box racers, audiophiles, and nuclear physicists were struggling against. Virginia Scharff Dr. Scharff is assistant professor of history at the University of New Mexico. She published Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming ofthe Motor Age in 1991, with the Free Press, and is coauthor of Present Tense: The United States since 1945 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992). Driving Ambitions: An Analysis of the American Hot Rod Enthusiasm. By H. F. Moorhouse. Manchester and New York: Manchester Univer­ sity Press, 1991; distributed by St. Martin’s Press. Pp. 231; notes, index. $29.95. Most readers of this journal presumably find nothing odd about subjecting hot rods and their subculture to academic scrutiny. Schol­ ars coming from other traditions, however, may be inclined to dismiss them as products of a prolonged adolescence that has been nurtured by an ethos of vulgar consumption. With this segment of the academic community the author of Driving Ambitions has no patience; his book is an attempt to understand hot rodding on its own terms, and in so doing gain a fuller comprehension of modern work, life, and leisure. The opening chapter takes on the legion of social critics who see modern life as consisting largely of dehumanizing, alienating work coupled with passive, commercially manipulated leisure pursuits; cars, if they are deemed worthy of mention, are significant only for their contributions to environmental destruction, highway fatalities, and numbing assembly-line routines. In direct contrast, H. F. Moor­ 420 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE house fastens on the hot rod and its subculture as a source of community, learning, craftsmanship, involvement, and creativity. This theme is developed systematically only in one subsequent chapter. The bulk of the text is devoted to a history of hot rodding that covers such topics as pre-World War II timing runs on the dry lakes of Southern California, the role of Hot Rod magazine and the closely associated National Hot Rod Association in promoting hot rodding as a safe and legitimate activity, the growth of a speed equipment industry and the challenge posed to it by clean-air legislation, the controversy over the use of nitromethane fuels for competition dragsters, women’s accomplishments within the sport, and sundry other matters. These chapters constitute a thoroughly competent narrative of the development of hot rodding, but contrib­ ute only marginally to the issues introduced in the first chapter. This lack of fit between the theoretical concerns initially addressed and the bulk of the book’s content is Driving Ambitions’ greatest shortcoming. Most readers attracted to the sociological issues intro­ duced in the opening chapter will have little interest in the contro­ versy over the use of exotic fuels by dragsters, while those interested in hot rodding per se will find the theoretical orientations at best irrelevant and at worst incomprehensible. The conceptual shortcomings of the book are exacerbated by shoddy production. The mangled spelling of many Southern Califor­ nia place names is perhaps excusable; the numerous misspellings of common words less so. Even worse, flawed typesetting and editing have rendered some...