OHQ vol. 114, no. 3 regionalism have preceded it,but this leads the way. All Westerners should have a good look. Walter Nugent University of Notre Dame (emeritus) Car Country: An Environmental History by Christopher W. Wells foreward by William Cronon University of Washington Press, Seattle and London, 2013. Illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, index. 464 pages. $40.00 cloth. In this well-written and broadly conceived work,ChristopherWellsoffersanewinterpretation of the way automobiles have reshaped the Americanlandscape.Herejectstwopopulartraditions :theonethatemphasizesthattheAmerican love affair with automobiles compelled rebuilding American urban environments to accommodatetheminanywayimaginable,and the other that sees darker corporate forces foisting on Americans a suburban world in which the automobile is a hard-and-fast necessity. Wells walks the line between these arguments, stressing the relationship between automobiles andthelandscapesbuilttoaccommodatethem. Theresultisananalysisthatrevealsmuchof the structuralfunctionalist’sinterestinequilibrium andsocialstabilityandeschewsthekindof dark culturalanalysesof automobilesthatbeganwith scholars such as Robert and Helen Lynd in the Middletown studies. The story Wells tells begins before the development of the automobile,with efforts to clean up urban filth and remove both urbanites and rural folk from the muck and mire of dirt roads. Although rural populations had to be convinced — often by urban bicyclists who saw good roads as a source of healthy leisure — Wellsnotesthatthemovement,consolidatedby the automobile, solved the serious problem of rural isolation.Good roads restructured towns and villages, made local environs less essential for farmers than the nearest large towns, and resolved class tensions that periodically appeared over road building. The persistent poor quality of rural roads affected the kind of automobiles that Americans manufactured, putting a premium on light vehicles that had a great deal of clearance — something Henry Ford was able to produce with increasing efficiency . Continued improvements in design and production gave the automobile a growing presence, especially in the cities where engineers sought to understand traffic flows on periodically congested and now fully paved streets to maximize movement in urban cores. It was a losing proposition,though,as there was continued growth in the number of automobiles sold — though never so prolifically as in the postwar era, when annual sales regularly exceeded the 1929 prewar record of nearly five million automobiles. It was not until the postwar era, when a number of forces came together, that “Car Country”came fully into being.Wells discusses the role of the federal government in encouraging suburban residential development that one might find in earlier books by Kenneth Jackson or Lizabeth Cohen, including the funding of interstates and mortgage guarantees by the FHA, but he also notes the impact of policies such as accelerated deprecation that provided tax incentives to engage in the costly process of planning suburban shopping centers . By the 1960s, a fully developed suburban complex effectively required residents to own automobiles. Wells concludes with a research study from the University of Michigan that found auto ownership and total miles traveled were highly correlated to whether one lived in a city largely built before the automobile. Presumably, people who have fewer cars and live in denser cities would continue to live without cars — even if parking were not such a headache. In this regard, he concludes that our love for automobiles has been mediated by the degree to which the built environment has Reviews compelled it.Whether or not one fully buys the argument — and the acknowledged inability of interwar urban engineers to keep up with the demands of traffic would suggest that there are still compelling reasons to think that it was the automobile that brought forth suburbia — the book provides a lot to think about with regard to the relationship between technology and the built environment. Moreover, there is a wealth of interesting information about automobiles and road building, the kind of details that will enhance cocktail conversation and class lectures alike for years. Lawrence M. Lipin Pacific University Morris Graves: Selected Letters edited by Vicki Halper and Lawrence Fong University of Washington Press, Seattle and London, 2013. Illustrations, index. 320 pages. $45.00 cloth. “[Frederick] Wright says in his recent catalog for the Whitney retrospective that I am a wanderer — a nomad.I think that misses the point or is the wrong way of saying it. I think I am, in this way, no more than another...