Cover for Driver's License book
2014
3.7(7 reviews)
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
161 pages
ISBN: 978-1628929782
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Driver's License

Description

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. A classic teenage fetish object, the American driver's license has long symbolized freedom and mobility in a nation whose design assumes car travel and whose vastness rivals continents. It is youth's pass to regulated vice-cigarettes, bars, tattoo parlors, casinos, strip joints, music venues, guns. In its more recent history, the license has become increasingly associated with freedom's flipside: screening. The airport's heightened security checkpoint. Controversial ID voting laws. Federally mandated, anti-terrorist driver's license re-designs. The driver's license encapsulates the contradictory values and practices of contemporary American culture-freedom and security, mobility and checkpoints, self-definition and standardization, democracy and exclusion, superficiality and intimacy, the stable self and the self in flux. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Book Information

Title:Driver's License
Author:Erica Wright
Series:Object Lessons Books
Published:2014
Pages:161
ISBN-13:978-1628929782

Series Progress

This book is part of the Object Lessons Books series.