Trucking Country: The Road to America's Wal-Mart Economy. By Shane Hamilton. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. 344p. $29.95.

Extract

In this timely new book, Shane Hamilton offers a compelling account of the politics of long-haul trucking in the postwar United States and, in particular, its contribution to the rise of economic conservatism by the end of the 1970s. This work, exhaustive in its research, explains a range of critical developments in twentieth-century political economy from the perspective of trucking: from the struggles within and between various federal agencies over farm, labor and consumption policies; to advances in truck design, highway construction, refrigeration, and food packaging technologies; to the cultural development of a trucking genre within country music and Hollywood films.