Description
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewJohnson has crafted a unique and exciting interdisciplinary treatise on the concept of energy in American life that profoundly informs our understanding of the basic cultural patterns of twentieth-century living. His writing style is spry and intelligent, while his insights are provocative and terribly important and should inspire scholars in a number of fields."" - Brian Black, author of
Crude Reality: Petroleum in World History and Petrolia: The Landscape of America's First Oil Boom"Bob Johnson examines the shift away from renewable energy to fossil fuels during the century before the energy crisis of the 1970s, and he explores the ambivalent cultural consequences of that transformation, as Americans sought to ignore its environmental costs as they embraced a narrative of technological empowerment" - David E. Nye, author of
Technology Matters"Armed with a dazzling array of facts and the insights of cultural criticism, Bob Johnson probes the subsoil ecology of the modern self, those psychic and material traumas that comprise the deepest collateral damage of our now international carbon economy." - Stephanie LeMenager, author of
Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American CenturyTable of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Modernity's Basement
- Part I: Divergence
- 1. A People of Prehistoric Carbon
- 2. Rocks and Bodies
- Part II: Submergence
- 3. An Upthrust into Barbarism
- 4. The Dynamo-Mother
- 5. A Faint Whiff of Gasoline
- Conclusion: A Return of the Repressed
- Appendix: Energy and Power
- Notes
- Selected Bibliography
- Index
