Crash Course: If You Want To Get Away With Murder Buy A Car

by Woodrow Phoenix

Overview

This book demands each of us look in the mirror and get real before we get behind the wheel.

When fragile human bodies have to occupy the same spaces as big, heavy, complex machines that can travel at high speeds, the outcome is inevitable. Some people will die. So why do we identify with the driver in the car rather than the person they have killed? Would you still shrug and chalk it up to random bad luck if that dead person was someone you loved?

Using the comic book format, this book vehemently dispels the notion that traffic accidents are inevitable and/or acceptable on any level, insisting that drivers own their responsibility, and consider the consequences of careless and dangerous behavior. It is part thought experiment, part testimonial, and part indictment of a dysfunctional transit environment that puts convenience for drivers ahead of logic, natural resources, and even ahead of human life. Crash Course questions the decisions that shape all our lives. Why don't roads serve everyone who needs to use them? What makes some people not worth protecting? Where do we start in fixing a broken system that facilitates the use of vehicles as murder weapons in places like Charlottesville, VA?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781951491017
Publisher:	Street Noise Books
Publication date:	08/04/2020
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range:	16 - 17 Years

About the Author

Woodrow Phoenix is a writer an artist and a designer whose work has appeared in publications across Europe, Japan and the U.S. He grew up in South London after his parents emigrated to the U.K. from Guyana. He is the author of Plastic Culture: How Japanese Toys Conquered the World.

Editorial Reviews

“Phoenix rails against the arrogance of consumers, carmakers, and government leaders who protect drivers over pedestrians; the dangers of self-driving cars; and the inequity in risk to drivers, themselves, exposed in the deadly police shootings of African-Americans during traffic stops.” —Publishers Weekly.

“Crash Co“A singular, passionate, and imploring wake-up call that shines a long overdue spotlight on the most prolific killer of our time.” —Ezra Claytan Daniels, author of Upgrade Soul and Bttm Fdrs.

“Crash Course shows with stark, painful precision what we lost when we surrendered our streets to cars. Woodrow Phoenix is a street fighter, using a strong visual language to put our eyes back on the road.” —Janette Sadik-Khan, former NYC Department of Transportation Commissioner, and author of Street Fight.

“In a country devoted to its automobile dependence, where we’re taught that driving is an expression of our all-American independence, Woodrow Phoenix’s disassembly of our car culture is a powerful and necessary critique. He illustrates the central injustice of our cities: the relegation of people to edges, and the complete devotion of our streets to vehicles. Phoenix makes an important case that our cities must be built for people.” —Danny Harris, Director of Transportation Alternatives.

“A very important work. Essential even. The approach to the subject is woefully underrepresented in literature, and at this particular crossroads we need to audit these 20th century metanarratives about the automobile and how it relates to notions of freedom and self.” —Ronald Wimberly, author of Prince of Cats, the graphic novel soon to be a major motion picture directed by Spike Lee.

“In Crash Course the furiously multi-talented Phoenix has set himself quite a challenge: to create a 200-page graphic novel about the danger of cars without ever drawing a car. And he has succeeded: Phoenix’s starkly beautiful black, white, and grey artwork portrays a dreamlike, depopulated world filled with traffic signs, lane markers, and streetlights; a world of empty roads, parking lots, highways, and overpasses. The book’s pithy captions highlight the incredible and insane ways the American roads prioritize automobiles at the cost of fragile human lives. Via chilling anecdotes, true-life stories, and statistics, Phoenix takes on car culture in all its forms: urban planning, advertising, glamour, legislation, self-driving cars, the dilemma of Driving While Black — and even shares some inspiring tales of how pedestrian movements are pushing back. In this land where car is king, Crash Course dares to show that the emperor has no clothes.” —Josh Neufeld, writer/artist of A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge.

“Woodrow Phoenix's gift is to use an unusual format, the comic, to transform our perspective. The car is the most normal thing in our landscape, isn't it? But Crash Course asks us to look at our world with new eyes. What if the car isn't normal? What if it's a barely-managed danger? It's a bracing book, and also a beautiful one.” —Jesse Thorn, owner of MaximumFun.org and host/producer of podcasts including Bullseye on National Public Radio.

“Crash Course is a beautiful and important book that illustrates starkly the tragedy of pedestrian auto fatalities in the US. Woodrow Phoenix’s sensitive mind and sharp pen should awaken urban planners, civic leaders and auto industry regulators and executives to their collective failure to adequately ensure the safety of citizens who don’t drive the sleek and powerful death traps that have taken the lives of so many.” —Charles Fleming, automobile and motorcycle writer at the L.A. Times, and author of the New York Times bestseller My Lobotomy.

From the Publisher

2020-05-10
A British graphic novelist offers a highly stylized critique of driving and its tragic consequences.

In this “extensively revised and updated version of Rumble Strip, Phoenix’s 2009 book, he delivers a painfully shocking indictment of driving. While not the most conventional medium for this kind of societal condemnation, the graphic narrative is undoubtedly thought-provoking. Phoenix opens with a frightening analogy positing that anytime you go anywhere, there’s a grand piano dangling from a flimsy fixture above your head. Sure, the point is that driving presents a danger to almost everyone, but despite its minimalist aesthetic, it’s a powerful image. The author delivers on the subtitle’s promise with real-world examples of people who were run down, either by accident or on purpose, and the perpetrators went free. Along the way, Phoenix explores the psychology of driving, institutional racism, and road rage, “an indulgent, doting term, dignifying and excusing behavior that has no dignity and no excuse.” The author also examines many of the absurd rules that govern driving worldwide as well as specific, avoidable deaths, like that of activist Heather Heyer, who was struck by a car and killed during the 2017 white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville. Phoenix’s ruminations on the inherent human behaviors behind driving—that primal need to be first, to be in front, to be the fastest, etc.—are among the book’s most searing insights and should drive readers to analyze their own conduct behind the wheel. The author also describes his own near-death experience during what should have been a simple drive from London to Brighton. The author’s probing commentary, combined with its stark visuals, effectively stokes the complicated emotions its author intended to instill in his readers: “I wrote this book to make you mad.” Mission accomplished.

A keen and unapologetic consideration of how driving often brings out the worst in us.

Kirkus Reviews