Fast Cars, Cool Rides: The Accelerating World of Youth and their Cars by Amy L. BestReview by: Deena WeinsteinSocial Forces, Vol. 86, No. 1 (Sep., 2007), pp. 380-382Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4495054 .

Accessed: 15/06/2014 05:49

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Social Forces.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 62.122.73.250 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 05:49:41 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

380 * Social Forces Volume 86, Number 1 * September 2007

Why bother? Congregations matter, Emerson argues, because they are so pervasive in American society and because they so thoroughly reflect American patterns of voluntary organizing. For those who participate in them, they often carry a good deal of social significance and moral authority. In spite of the hyper- segregation that describes the vast majority of congregations, when they do manage to bring a diverse membership together, the experience has real effects on the social networks of those who participate. They are far more likely to have a multiracial circle of friends than are others in the population, to operate outside their assigned "melting pot" (i.e., White, Latino, Asian, etc.). Emerson is, finally, hopeful that there is momentum moving some congregations toward the conviction that they cannot accomplish their mission as organizations without becoming racially diverse.

This book is written with a non-specialist audience in mind. Most of the methodological detail is in the appendices, and the statistics are easily interpretable. Emerson wants religious leaders themselves to be able to read this book, and he has a good track record of getting their attention. That should not dissuade non-practitioners, however. This account is deeply informed by an understanding of the history of race in the United States, by the literature on organizational culture and organizational change, and by solid statistical analysis. In this book, Emerson has continued his contribution to understanding how homophily works and how religion does and doesn't serve as a bridging force in an increasingly diverse society. Students of nonprofit organizations, of community, and of race and ethnic relations will benefit from reading this book no less than students of American religion.

Fast Cars, Cool Rides: The Accelerating World of Youth and their Cars By Amy L. Best New York University Press, 2006. 260 pages. $65 (cloth), $20 (paper)

Reviewer: Deena Weinstein, DePaul University

"Riding along in my automobile...cruisin' and playin' the radio with no particular place to go." That Chuck Berry song, along with tons of other rock tunes, provide one way to grasp youth culture. Amy Best does it with cars. Surely they aren't any more the royal road into youth culture than is popular music, but Best's choice is as good a one as any.

For 21st century American youth, or at least the 16-25 year olds in San Jose, California that Best studied, cars are overburdened with meaning. She employs a variety of methods beyond consulting a wide range of literature (she is weakest on the history of youth and claims incorrectly that youth culture in general is understood as oppositional), especially unstructured interviews and non- participant observations, mainly at two sites: the cruising scene and the high school auto shop. She describes how cars are locales for a variety of practices (like cruising and modifying for racing), but also tools, major consumer culture commodities, sites for a variety of practices, and symbols of key demographics and of freedom itself.

This content downloaded from 62.122.73.250 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 05:49:41 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Book Reviews * 381

Given (sub)urban sprawl and the absence of mass transit alternatives, young people need cars to get to school, shopping and work. Parents are all too happy to have their 16 year olds get a driver's license so that they can relinquish their chauffeuring duties. Kenny works 40 hours a week, paying more than half of his earnings toward his car. "His car is his ticket to freedom, to mobility, his means to an end, his claim to visibility, to being a somebody and not a nobody invisible to the world around him," (136) Best concludes. Parents who supply (or help with financing) a car for their offspring get to negotiate driving privileges that often include saddling the young with driving siblings around and running household errands. Yet young peoples' desire for cars - boys especially - has little to do with practicality.

Ever since cars became part of youth culture in the post-WWII era, they have served as vehicles for escaping the parental gaze. Best sets most of her sights on two of the main spaces in which youth gather with cars - racing cars on the town's periphery and cruising down the main drag. Although both of these activities are illegal, at the end of the book in her discussion of the way in which youth are inserted in the commodity culture, Best seemingly ignores most of her research and concludes that "[y]outh car culture is not something youth themselves create apart from or necessarily in opposition to the dominant culture." (170)

Racing and cruising are rife with displays of gender and ethnicity; they are sites of youth identity. Referencing Baudrillard, Best underscores the car's "'identity value' in that they act as markers of social and cultural difference and thus communicate ideas about who we are in relation to who others are." (4)

One group of racers, offspring of Chinese, Indian and Vietnamese immigrants, use imported cars (from Asia) in preference to American muscle cars (used by Anglos). For them, "[s]peed, driver skill, and a willingness to take risks behind the wheel are what matter most... A slow car, no matter its appearance, provides little opportunity to demonstrate any of these virtues." (81) Although they distance themselves from feminine practices of paying too much attention to the body (car body or otherwise)..." (95), their masculinity is defined without reference to women.

In contrast, the gender identities of the mainly Mexican-Americans cruising with two to five kids, all male or all female, are invidiously displayed as they set their sights on seeing and being seen. "Having a cool car is the key to gaining visibility for boys in this culture," (63) Best states. She indicates that cool now means expensive vehicles outfitted with after-market parts. Women who cruise, or who stand around the main drag, use their time and money to upgrade their own rather than their cars' appearance. "They are well aware that how they look serves as the basis of whether a boy will look at or through them." (63) One of Best's interview subjects - a first generation Hispanic college student speaking in a group of her peers - said: "Everybody's out there, everybody's trying to get their face seen, they're trying to get holla'd at." (79) More than their face, it would seem; girls often flash their breasts. Seeing and being seen as gone high-tech in this Silicon Valley town. Best "observed countless young men with handheld camcorders, repeatedly zeroing in on young women's bodies, their breasts and backsides." (62)

This content downloaded from 62.122.73.250 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 05:49:41 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

382 * Social Forces Volume 86, Number I * September 2007

Because we never learn what the kids are listening to on their car's high-end sound systems it isn't clear whether it is they, or Best, who privilege sight over sound, or value them both equally as accessories of identity.

Class And Labor in Iran: Did the Revolution Matter? By Farhad Nomani and Sohrab Behdad Syracuse University Press, 2006. 268 pages. $49.95 (cloth), $24.95 (paper)

Reviewer: Misagh Parsa, Dartmouth College

Social revolutions involve transformations of state and class structures. By this definition, the 1979 Iranian revolution, which, toppled the monarchy and established an Islamic Republic, constituted a social revolution. For more than two decades, scholarly debates focused on the causes and processes of the revolution. Most academic works paid little attention to the precise nature of changes in the post-revolutionary social structure. In this excellent, empirically based book, Nomani and Behdad analyze the impact of the 1979 revolution on the Iranian class structure.

The book examines the reconfiguration of Iran's labor force in the last three decades and presents a conceptual framework for analyzing social classes. Although both authors are economists by training, their analytic perspective relies heavily on the works of leading sociologists, particularly Erik Wright. Given the specificities of a state-based economy, they modify existing sociological concepts to explain Iran's development. They argue that with the revolution, the new state began a quest for an Islamic utopia, claiming to abolish the class of Taghot, or those driven by the arrogance of wealth and power, and institute the rule of the Mostazafin, the oppressed and the powerless. They proclaimed their intention to eradicate poverty, exploitation, and end the "imperialism of East and West" through a petty bourgeois Shi'i theocracy. But, Ayatollah Khomeini and his followers opposed radical ideas that would eliminate private property and establish an Islamic socialist economy. Instead, they declared that the Islamic state would act as arbiter and grantor of class balance to generate relative equality.

Yet, according to Nomani and Behdad, post-revolutionary conflicts quickly put Iran's economy in a crisis as social confrontation challenged the sanctity of property, disrupting production and accumulation. This process, "structural involution," was accompanied with the expansion of petty-commodity economic activities, deproletarianization, peasantization of agriculture, and expansion of service activities. The involutionary process lasted for first ten years. During the period, Iran's real national income per capita declined by 58 percent, as the population grew from 38 million to 53 million. Unfavorable economic realities revealed the "futility of the Islamic utopian dream of the leaders of the Islamic state." (45) At the same time, corruption and clientalism provided ample opportunities for accumulating wealth by those who had access to the state. Thus, Bonyad Mostasafan, The Foundation of the Oppressed, composed of 400 companies, became the largest economic entity in the Middle East.

This content downloaded from 62.122.73.250 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 05:49:41 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions