Drive: A ROAD TRIP THROUGH OUR COMPLICATED AFFAIR WITH THE AUTOMOBILE

by Tim Falconer

Book by Falconer, Tim

288 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 2008

About the author

Tim Falconer’s latest book, Windfall: Viola MacMillan and Her Notorious Mining Scandal, came out in February 2025. A prospector and mine developer, MacMillan had it all: success, money and respect. Influence, even. But in 1964, after three decades in the mining industry, one of the most fascinating women in Canadian business history was the central character in one of the country’s most famous stock scandals.

Fakconer is the author of five previous non-fiction books. Klondikers: Dawson City's Stanley Cup Challenge and How a Nation Fell in Love with Hockey tells the story of an unlikely team of dreamers and their audacious journey from the Yukon to Ottawa to play for the Stanley Cup in 1905. Their quest showed how quickly hockey—a niche, regional sport when Lord Stanley donated the trophy a dozen years earlier—had become the national pastime. Klondikers: made the Globe and Mail's Top 100 of 2021 list.

Bad Singer: The Surprising Science of Tone Deafness and How We Hear Music follows Falconer’s quest to overcome tone deafness and sing in tune. Along the way, he learns about human evolution and music, the brain science behind tone-deafness, and what we really hear when we listen to music. Bad Singer made the Globe and Mail's Top 100 of 2016 list and was a finalist for the Lane Anderson Award. The New York Times called it “fascinating and fun.”

Falconer is also the author of That Good Night: Ethicists, Euthanasia and End-of-Life Care, Drive: A Road Trip through Our Complicated Affair with the Automobile and Watchdogs and Gadflies: Activism from Marginal to Mainstream. And he helped popular parenting guru Dr. Alex Russell write Drop the Worry Ball: How to Parent in the Age of Entitlement.

Reviews

[rabbitprincess · Rating 3 out of 5]

* * * 1/2

An interesting look at mostly North America's relationship with the car and how our society has essentially become subjugated to the car instead of the car being an instrument of freedom. The author took a road trip from Toronto to California, along the way meeting car enthusiasts, traffic managers and proponents of better development to reduce the impact of urban sprawl and our dependence on the car.

Overall it was an enjoyable read -- it's a topic I'm interested in and the book covers quite a bit of ground (not just the physical distance on the road trip, but subject-wise). One of the people interviewed is Sgt. Cam Woolley of the OPP, with whom Ontarians are very familiar because of the long-weekend enforcement blitzes. He always has amusingly horrifying stories about the dumb things people do on the highway. The book also provides interesting perspectives on the car problem -- it's a health problem because people spend all their time in their cars instead of walking or biking, it's an environment problem because of the pollution and the consumption of arable land, it's a societal problem because people feel disconnected from everyone and the time spent in traffic jams is so unproductive and burns people out. It was also instructive to witness the author's struggles with his relationship with the car: very much love-hate, and that feeling was only deepened by his road trip. It's good that there is no sugar-coating, no easy solution being proposed, because there isn't one.

The only major criticism I would have of this book is the physical descriptions of the people being interviewed; I didn't really find them necessary. I understand that they may have been simply to set the scene, but I don't need to know that this professor is balding or that car enthusiast is portly. It detracted a bit from the book.

Otherwise, I recommend this book if you're interested in the topic. Also check out the road-trip playlist in Appendix A! That was a very fun addition and may inspire you to create your own playlists for future trips in the automobiles you love or hate.

[R.J. Gilmour · Rating 5 out of 5]

A journalist/teacher from Ryerson University Falconer's newest book Drive: A Road Trip Through our Complicated Affair with the Automobile (Toronto: Viking Canada, 2008) is a rumination on North America's relationship and fascination with cars. Written in a style similar to that of Michael Pollan and Christopher Benfey (a style I am increasingly recognizing that I really enjoy), Falconer uses each item in his book as a place to digress into a complete history of that subject. This style of writing allows the author to digress into a whole host of subjects, allowing his (and that of the reader) to follow intellectual curiosity wherever it leads. The style is not dissimilar to reading on the web (maybe that is where its energy comes from?), encountering diverse links and entries allowing the reader to explore other topics and subjects. It makes for fascinating reading and allows the reader to travel along with Falconer, beside him in his physical journey across the continent (he travels from Toronto to Los Angeles and back) and in his intellectual journey to understand how we see our cars. He discusses all aspects of car culture both proponents and critics of North American car culture and attempts to place it in a larger international context (he briefly discusses Britain and Argentina). I found myself looking forward each night to being transported along with Falconer and referring to my handy-dandy bedside driving atlas of North America tracing his journeys and remembering my own travels along some of the same highways.