Vancouver BC

Stop Signs: Cars and Capitalism on the Road to Economic, Social and Ecological Decay

Book Launch & Discussion

7:00pm
Monday June 27 2011

BOOK LAUNCH/EVENT!
       “Stop Signs: Cars and Capitalism on the Road to Economic, Social and Ecological Decay”
By Bianca Mugyenyi and Yves Engler

Book Launch & Discussion with Vancouver city councilor David Cadman, International President ICLEI-Local Governments for Sustainability, and author Yves Engler
June 27th at 7PM,
Room 1700,
Simon Fraser University at Harbour Center
**************
In North America, human beings have become enthralled by the automobile: A quarter of our working lives are spent paying for them; communities fight each other for the right to build more of them; our cities have been torn down, remade and planned with their needs as the overriding concern; wars are fought to keep their fuel tanks filled; songs are written to praise them; cathedrals are built to worship them. In Stop Signs: Cars and Capitalism on the Road to Economic, Social and Ecological Decay, authors Bianca Mugyenyi and Yves Engler argue that the automobile's ascendance is inextricably linked to capitalism and involved corporate malfeasance, political intrigue, backroom payoffs, media manipulation, racism, academic corruption, third world coups, secret armies, environmental destruction and war. An anti-car, road-trip story, Stop Signs is a must-read for all those who wish to escape the clutches of auto domination.
 
“Mugyenyi and Engler's Stop Signs is at one and the same time an entertaining, fact-filled anthropological tour of the land of Homo Automomotivis, and the first all-out global ecological critique of the American automobile addiction. Not since Jane Holtz Kay's Asphalt Nation has a book appeared that so clearly exposed the auto-irrationality of the most car-dependent country on earth.”
— John Bellamy Foster, editor of Monthly Review and co-author, The Ecological Rift
 
“In Stop Signs, Mugyenyi and Engler take readers on an insightful, fact-filled journey through the primary habitat of the car-dominated species they call Homo automotivis. With wit and originality, they weave travel tales into a convincing argument against the auto economy, culminating with a fresh call to leave car culture behind.”
— Katie Alvord, Author, Divorce Your Car! Ending the Love Affair with the Automobile
 
“Mugyenyi and Engler illustrate the relationship between cars and suburban living. You come away shaken, but ready to roll up your sleeves and contribute, however modestly, to constructing a new world in the twenty-first century.”
— Richard Bergeron, Montreal city councilor, urban planner and author
 
Yves Engler has been dubbed “one of the most important voices on the Canadian Left today” (Briarpatch magazine) and “in the mould of I. F.  Stone” (Globe and Mail). His four previous books, including the “Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy” have been praised by Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, William Blum and many others.
 
For more information about the book go to: http://stopsigns.fairtrademedia.com/?page_id=7
For the latest Stop Signs review go to: http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/05/steering-away-from-car-culture/
For more information about the June 27th event contact Bernadette Stringer at: bstringer@shaw.ca or (604) 258-2700
The authors can be contacted directly at: stopsignsbook@gmail.com