Fast Cars, Cool Rides: The Accelerating World of Youth and Their Cars

Amy L. Best

ISBN 10: 0814799310 / ISBN 13: 9780814799314

Editore: NYU Press, 2005

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Item in good condition. Textbooks may not include supplemental items i.e. CDs, access codes etc.

Codice articolo 00054727303

Dati bibliografici

• Titolo: Fast Cars, Cool Rides: The Accelerating World of Youth and Their Cars
• Editore: NYU Press
• Data di pubblicazione: 2005
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0814799310
• ISBN 13: 9780814799314
• Rilegatura: Brossura
• Condizione: Good

Descrizione articolo

Riassunto

Bass booms from custom speakers, pick-up trucks boast lowered suspensions, chrome rims reflect stoplights, and bare arms dangle from open windows. Welcome to Santa Clara Street in San Jose, California, where every weekend kids come to cruise late at night, riding their cars slow and low. On the surrounding, less-traveled streets you can also find young men racing customized cars to see who has the "go," not just the "show." And, in the daylight hours, in a nearby suburb, you might find a brand new SUV parked in the driveway, a parents' Sweet 16 present.
In Fast Cars, Cool Rides Amy Best provides a fascinating account of kids and car culture. Encompassing everything from learning to drive to getting one’s license, from cruising to customizing, from racing to buying one's first car, Best shows that never before have cars played such an important role in the lives of America's youth as they do today. Drawing on interviews with over 100 young men and women, aged 15-24, and five years of research—cruising hot spots, sitting in on auto shop class, attending car shows—Best explores the fast-paced world of kids and their cars. She reveals a world where cars have incredible significance for kids today, as a means of transportation and thereby freedom to come and go, as status symbols and as a means to express their identities. But while having a fast car or a cool ride can carry tremendous importance for these kids, Best shows that the price, especially when it can cost $30,000, can be steep as working-class kids work jobs to make car payments and as college kids forgo moving out of Mom and Dad's house because they can't pay for rent, car payments, and car insurance.
Fast Cars, Cool Rides offers a rare and rich portrait of the complex and surprising roles cars can play in the lives of young Americans. Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a cool ride.

L'autore

Amy L. Best is Professor of the Sociology at George Mason University. She is author of Prom Night Youth, Schools and Popular Culture, which was selected for the 2002 American Educational Studies Association Critics’ Choice Award, and Fast Cars, Cool Rides: The Accelerating World of Youth and Their Cars. She is also the editor of Representing Youth: Methodological Issues in Critical Youth Studies.