PHIL PATTON is a writer for The New York Times' "Public Eye" and"Design Notebook," a contributing editor at Esquire, Wired, and ID, anda consulting curator for the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition"Different Roads: Automobiles for a New Century." He is also the authorof Dreamland: Travels Inside the Secret World of Roswell and Area 51.

Books Articles Contact: philpatton@msn.com

A VW ad in the 60s described the Beetle and the Coke bottle as the twobest known shapes in the world . Phil Patton says he really understoodthe extent to which the Bug had become a global icon when he saw inZimbabwe a toy Beetle handmade of tin cans, with opening doors and hoodand a functioning steering wheel. It is hard to imagine any otherartifact whose biography includes as vital players Adolph Hitler, HenryFord, Charles Manson, Walt Disney, and Woody Allen. The car that beganas a product of Nazi propaganda was, in the postwar years, transformedby American salesmanship into a counterculture icon. With theintroduction of the New Beetle in 1998, a new, global chapter of thecar's history began. Phil Patton, a Design Notebook columnist for theNew York times, traveled to Berlin, Stuttgart, and Mexico City to tellthe Bug's story. And the more he learned about the bug, the more he sawit as a lens through which the whole cultural and political history ofthe century came into focus, from Nazism to the Sixties counterculture,the Cold War, to today's global manufacturing. After the war, the fewBeetles in the U.S. were those shipped over by American servicemen, butwhen VW hired the innovative ad agency, Doyle Dane Bernbach to build acampaign, it defused the car's greatest liability: A Jewish firm wouldsell Hitler's car. With the growing popularity of better-built andbetter-engineered cars from Japan in the 1980s, the Bug lost its appeal,and the New Beetle introduced in 1998 was far removed from its Germanroots-designed in America and built in Mexico, it is a product of theglobal economy, like Nikes and Swatch watches. Far more than anautomotive history, this is the history of an artifact and its social,political, and culture implications, not unlike The Map that Changedthe World, or Cod."

BUG: THE STRANGE MUTATIONS OF THE WORLD'S MOST FAMOUS AUTOMOBILE

"A peppy, perspicacious cultural history of the Volkswagen."
-- Kirkus Reviews

"A super job ... Patton (writes) with authority and style ... This first-rate blend of business and social history should hit a chord of nostalgia with many readers. "
-- BookPages

What do Ferdinand Porsche, Adolf Hitler, Henry Ford, and Walt Disney have in common? They've all played a pivotal role in the development of the most produced and best known car of all time: the Volkswagen Beetle. Cultural chronicler Phil Patton brilliantly traces this distinctive car's evolution and its impact beyond the highway and around the world in BUG (Simon & Schuster; $25.00). Patton attests that "the Bug's mental life far exceeds its metal one. The Bug stands as proof that images and ideas swing through culture as if by their own power, evolving, adapting to new environments, latching on to new human champions, infecting new human beings with enthusiasm."

Since 1941, more than 22 million VW Beetles have been built. Originating in Germany, Bugs have been manufactured in Brazil, Australia, and Nigeria, and driven with a passion across the United States. Today, the largest plant is far from the Bug's homeland-in Puebla, Mexico. The New Beetle is a high-tech, high-style homage to the original and was unveiled in 1998. About a hundred miles from the factory, Mexico City is infested with the "old" Bug-nearly two million of the species. In spite of their surface similarities-the signature shape and colors, proudly exaggerated in the 1998 incarnation-the old and the new Beetles are worlds apart, mechanically and culturally.

In captivating detail, BUG follows every turn and twist on the road from conception to icon. From Berlin to Detroit, from Madison Avenue to Hollywood, Phil Patton illuminates how economic and political forces shaped the Beetle-and how the Beetle made its mark on history. Among many remarkable chapters in the car's biography:

• How Hitler conceived the Beetle as a reliable and affordable "real car" for the German people, how Porsche made the Fuhrer's vision of streamlined function a working reality, and how the Nazis used the revolutionary car as a tool for propaganda.
• How, in the early 1950s, the Beetle was imported and transformed into an all-American symbol of simplicity, durability, economy, and savvy-thanks to the innovative advertising campaigns of Doyle Dane Bernbach, an ad agency owned by unabashed Jews.
• How, in the early 1960s, the Bug attached itself to the emerging counterculture by boldly standing apart from the tail-finned monsters of Detroit-and, in 1969, made Disney hip by starring in The Love Bug, which beat out Easy Rider at the box office.
• How the Beetle earned a place in time capsules and rose up again as a chic embodiment of retro-clinching cameos in Austin Powers' flicks and re-igniting interest in VW car clubs as well as the "Bug-ins" and "Bug-outs" car festivals - and is now populating all roads as a global citizen.

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• JUNE 2004:
• Now in paperback from Perseus Books:

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