Lifeblood : University of Minnesota Press : 9780816677856 : 0816677859 : 09 Aug 2013 : If our oil addiction is so bad for us, why don&;t we kick the habit? Looking beyond the usual culprits&;Big Oil, petro-states, and the strategists of empire&;Lifeblood finds a deeper and more complex explanation in everyday practices of oil consumption in American culture. Those practices, Matthew T. Huber suggests, have in fact been instrumental in shaping the broader cultural politics of American capitalism. How did gasoline and countless other petroleum products become so central to our notions of the American way of life? Huber traces the answer from the 1930s through the oil shocks of the 1970s to our present predicament, revealing that oil&;s role in defining popular culture extends far beyond material connections between oil, suburbia, and automobility. He shows how oil powered a cultural politics of entrepreneurial life&;the very American idea that life itself is a product of individual en