PDF One for the Road Drunk Driving since 1900 9781421407746 Medicine Health Science Books
PDF One for the Road Drunk Driving since 1900 9781421407746 Medicine Health Science Books
Download As PDF : One for the Road Drunk Driving since 1900 9781421407746 Medicine Health Science Books
Don’t drink and drive. It's a deceptively simple rule, but one that is all too often ignored. And while efforts to eliminate drunk driving have been around as long as automobiles, every movement to keep drunks from driving has hit some alarming bumps in the road.
Barron H. Lerner narrates the two strong―and vocal―sides to this debate in the United States those who argue vehemently against drunk driving, and those who believe the problem is exaggerated and overregulated. A public health professor and historian of medicine, Lerner asks why these opposing views exist, examining drunk driving in the context of American beliefs about alcoholism, driving, individualism, and civil liberties.
Angry and bereaved activist leaders and advocacy groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving campaign passionately for education and legislation, but even as people continue to be killed, many Americans remain unwilling to take stronger steps to address the problem. Lerner attributes this attitude to Americans’ love of drinking and love of driving, an inadequate public transportation system, the strength of the alcohol lobby, and the enduring backlash against Prohibition. The stories of people killed and maimed by drunk drivers are heartrending, and the country’s routine rejection of reasonable strategies for ending drunk driving is frustratingly inexplicable.
This book is a fascinating study of the culture of drunk driving, grassroots and professional efforts to stop it, and a public that has consistently challenged and tested the limits of individual freedom. Why, despite decades and decades of warnings, do people still choose to drive while intoxicated? One for the Road provides crucial historical lessons for understanding the old epidemic of drunk driving and the new epidemic of distracted driving.
PDF One for the Road Drunk Driving since 1900 9781421407746 Medicine Health Science Books
"This history of drunk driving covers many aspects of the problem, from the incidences of crashes and deaths due to drunk driving (which the author sometimes calls drinking driving), societal attitudes, and how society's attitudes were influenced by grass-roots organizations such as MADD and RID. The author, who admits he is opposed to driving after drinking, explores environmental factors that influence drinking driving, such as degree of alcohol access, lack of public transportation, and laws around drunk driving meant to be deterrances.
This book is intersting, well-written, insightful & informative. Anyone interested in the problem will like this book. I thought the author also presented views from people he didn't agree with, for some balance."
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Tags : One for the Road Drunk Driving since 1900 9781421407746 Medicine Health Science Books @ ,Barron H. Lerner,One for the Road Drunk Driving since 1900,Johns Hopkins University Press,1421407744,Public Health,Social History,United States - 20th Century,Consumer Health,Drunk Driving, DWI/DUIMADD (Mothers Against Drunk Drving), Distracted Driving, Designated Driver, Candy Lightner, Neo-prohibitionism, Public Health, Alcoholism,Drunk Driving; DWI/DUIMADD (Mothers Against Drunk Drving); Distracted Driving; Designated Driver; Candy Lightner; Neo-prohibitionism; Public Health; Alcoholism,HISTORY / Social History,HISTORY / United States / 20th Century,Health Fitness / Safety,History,History Social History,History United States - 20th Century,History of science,History of the Americas,History/American,History/Social History,History/United States - 20th Century,History American,MEDICAL / Public Health,Medical/Public Health,Non-Fiction,Public health preventive medicine,SCIENCE / History,Safety,Social cultural history,UNIVERSITY PRESS,United States,History American,History of science,History of the Americas,Public health preventive medicine,Social cultural history
One for the Road Drunk Driving since 1900 9781421407746 Medicine Health Science Books Reviews :
One for the Road Drunk Driving since 1900 9781421407746 Medicine Health Science Books Reviews
- This history of drunk driving covers many aspects of the problem, from the incidences of crashes and deaths due to drunk driving (which the author sometimes calls drinking driving), societal attitudes, and how society's attitudes were influenced by grass-roots organizations such as MADD and RID. The author, who admits he is opposed to driving after drinking, explores environmental factors that influence drinking driving, such as degree of alcohol access, lack of public transportation, and laws around drunk driving meant to be deterrances.
This book is intersting, well-written, insightful & informative. Anyone interested in the problem will like this book. I thought the author also presented views from people he didn't agree with, for some balance. - A wonky work about the public policy and perception of drunk driving and the movement to curb this practice in our society. The author does an admirable job dressing up a topic that is not given to excitement, albeit outcry. You get a great understanding of how the public awareness of this issue and rage against those who drive drunk made a huge impact on where we are today with this important public policy issue.
- Best book I've read so far about the drunk driving industry. Very detailed, good historical perspective. Learned a lot from reading this.
- Got it quick. Book is interesting.
- No one approaches drunk driving policy in a vacuum. Each person has a background and a bias, and the most impressive part of this book is that Dr. Lerner is quite clear about his bias and then tries hard to craft a balanced history book that will help inform readers from other backgrounds. Dr. Lerner is an expert in public health issues, and he writes a passionate story of the way that drunk driving (and public perceptions of drunk driving, from media coverage to legislation) has had an impact on public health in the last hundred years. I had a hard time reading this book because of my own personal perspectives, but it does contain a wealth of information, organized in an effective way to tell the story of a nation that is failing to keep its people safe on the roads.
For the first few chapters of this book, Dr. Lerner shares horror stories of the early days of drunk driving, with outrageously lenient sentences for devastating crashes and a pervasive public attitude that drinking and driving wasn't a big deal. As someone born in 1980, I have never lived in a world without TV commercials and special episodes and school assemblies about the dangers of drunk driving, and I was shocked by the way the problem was first viewed. Dr. Lerner follows those stories with thorough chapters on the impact of MADD and related groups, along with the ways that policy objectives and legislation have shifted over the years. The book also has plenty of examples from the European Union to show other paths that have been taken in efforts to keep the roads safe. I learned a great deal from this book, so Dr. Lerner achieved his objective.
My main problems with the book come from its tone. Dr. Lerner approaches the problem as a public health concern, which he does justify with analogies and statistics, and he makes a good case that the most significant legislative advancements have come from those who share his perspective. I do not share that perspective, though, as I am a public defender. Like many (if not most) public defenders at the district court level in Massachusetts, I handle drunk driving cases on a regular basis - on any given day, the majority of my caseload may be drunk driving cases. As someone who drives in Massachusetts, I definitely have an interest in arriving at my destinations safely, and I agree that drunk driving is unsafe at a legally intolerable level. I lost two friends a few years ago, in a car accident where the driver had been drinking. Nevertheless, as a public defender, I also have a huge interest in making sure that people's rights are protected throughout the process of investigation and prosecution of a crime. I have a hard time reading a book in which Dr. Lerner makes (understandably) unapologetic remarks about sleazy defense lawyers getting their guilty clients off because, for example, there is reasonable doubt as to how accurate a breath test device is, or Dr. Lerner's open praise for mandatory sentences and license suspensions. (In my first draft of this review, I went off on a long tangent about how public health attitudes toward drunk driving are incompatible with the criminal justice system, but I realized that I do not want to invite an anonymous internet debate that distracts from my recommendations with respect to the book - please don't comment with your thoughts on drunk driving)
My point is that although the book does present multiple angles and perspectives as they relate to the impact of drunk driving in the States, Dr. Lerner is very clear that approaches that prioritize the rights of people accused of crimes are never more valuable than approaches that risk infringement of rights in the interest of saving lives. I suspect that very few people will take issue with that value judgment (defense attorneys, some industry lobbyists, probably many people who have been accused of drunk driving...), but I want to make sure that this ideological minority is given fair warning before choosing this book. To his credit, though, Dr. Lerner saves most of his bile for the outrages of the pre-MADD era, and by the time actual MADD representatives enter the story, the book sounds less like one of their pamphlets and more like a simple historical analysis.
I do recommend this book for historians and other scholars, as Dr. Lerner presents thorough research in a clear fashion. I simply reserve a little warning about the public health perspective. - Barron Lerner's book "One for the Road" is a study of the politics, legal policies and procedures of dealing with intoxicated automobile drivers. To my knowledge it is the first academic study dedicated to analyzing the real cost-to the intoxicated driver, to society, and to the victims-of drinking and driving.
As an academic study this book is fascinating. Lerner starts by discussing popular and unpopular conceptions of the person who chooses to drink and drive. Lerner sites incidents of people who chose to drink and drive and their consequences. Initially their consequences are not very severe. Drinking and driving in the early part of the 20th century was seen as an activity done by the carefree and rich-the "Great Gatsby" lot. This did not change despite prohibition in the 1920s and 1930s-a time when Lerner states drinking and driving, with deadly consequences rose rapidly. Only some cases of drinking and driving with fatal consequences received media attention-such as that of Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone with the Wind, hit by a car operated by an intoxicated driver in 1949.
Consequences of drinking and driving increased in the late 1970s and 1980s. The establishment of MADD (Mothers against drunk drivers) and RID (Remove Intoxicated Drivers) increased laws and regulations around drinking and driving. Driving while intoxicated by society is now seen as something that needs to be punished, rather than as a source of humor (think Dudley Moore in the first "Arthur" movie).
As an alcohol and drug counselor who has worked with hundreds of impaired drivers in counseling, this book helped me see how social groups can cause laws to be changed. It also helped me see how perceptions of alcohol use while operating machinery/driving a vehicle has evolved over the years. I admit that I had never heard of the organization RID before, and I admire Doris Aiken for starting it (a person who was never had a family member be the victim of a drinking and driving accident). Reading about Candy Lightner (founder of MADD ) and Cindy Lamb (her daughter was paralyzed by a drunk driver at 5 months of age) really affected me.
This book offers no judgement on how drinking and driving should be handled by the law. It is simply a historical study of the phenominon of drinking and driving, and how policies and procedures to handle intoxicated drivers over the years have evolved. I highly recommend this book to anyone in my field who wants a historical perspective on how society and the law has handled drunk drivers over the years. I also recommend this book highly to anyone who is curious about the history of drunk driving, and movements created to establish laws concerning drunk driving.
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