San Antonio College Library

Documents how luxury goods have been transformed by a shift from exclusive distribution practices by quality-minded family businesses to mass production by profit-minded big corporations, examining how today's methods have had a negative impact.

"The twentieth-century American experience with the automobile has much to tell us about the relationship between consumer capitalism and the environment, Tom McCarthy contends. In Auto Mania he presents the first environmental history of the automobile that shows how consumer desire (and manufacturer decisions) created impacts across the product life cycle - from raw material extraction to manufacturing to consumer use to disposal."--Jacket.