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Two Wheels Good - The History and Mystery of the Bicycle (Hardcover)
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Two Wheels Good - The History and Mystery of the Bicycle (Hardcover)
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A panoramic revisionist portrait of the nineteenth-century
invention that is transforming the twenty-first-century world. 'The
real feat of this book is that it takes us on a ride-across the
centuries and around the globe, through startling history and vivid
first-person reporting.' - Patrick Radden Keefe, New York Times
bestselling author of Empire of Pain The bicycle is a vestige of
the Victorian era, seemingly out of pace with our age of
smartphones and ridesharing apps and driverless cars. Yet across
the world, more people travel by bicycle than by any other form of
transportation. Almost anyone can learn to ride a bike - and nearly
everyone does. In Two Wheels Good, writer and critic Jody Rosen
reshapes our understanding of this ubiquitous machine, an
ever-present force in humanity's life and dreamlife, and a
flashpoint in culture wars for more for than two hundred years.
Combining history, reportage, travelogue, and memoir, Rosen unfolds
the bicycle's saga from its invention in 1817 to its present-day
renaissance as a 'green machine' in a world afflicted by pandemic
and climate change. Readers meet unforgettable characters: feminist
rebels who steered bikes to the barricades in the 1890s, a
Bhutanese king who races mountain bikes in the Himalayas,
astronauts who ride a floating bicycle in zero gravity aboard the
International Space Station. Two Wheels Good examines the bicycle's
past and peers into its future, challenging myths and cliches,
while uncovering cycling's connection to colonial conquest and the
gentrification of cities. But the book is also a love letter: a
reflection on the sensual and spiritual pleasures of bike riding
and an ode to an engineering marvel - a wondrous vehicle whose
passenger is also its engine. 'Love for two-wheeled transport runs
through every sentence in the book' - Economist 'The best thing
I've ever read on a single subject' - Lauren Collins, author of
When in French 'This is social history as it ought to be written:
funny, precise, surprising, anti-dogmatic and unafraid of following
a story' - Adam Gopnik, author of Paris to the Moon
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