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**SHORTLISTED FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES SPORTS BOOK AWARDS 2023** 'Full
of delightful anecdotes and interviews and fascinating historical
tales' Mail on Sunday A panoramic portrait of the wonderous vehicle
whose passenger is also its engine. A toy, a tool, a liberator, or
complete nuisance: the bicycle has been many things to many people
over the decades, yet it endures as the most popular form of
transport in the world. How has such a simple machine achieved so
much? Combining history, travelogue and memoir, Jody Rosen reshapes
our understanding of this ubiquitous vehicle from its invention in
1817 to its present-day renaissance as a 'green machine'. Readers
meet unforgettable characters: women's suffragists 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. By examining the bicycle's past and
peering into its future, Two Wheels Good forms a joyful ode to an
engineering marvel of global importance. 'Funny, precise,
surprising' Adam Gopnik 'Love for two-wheeled transport runs
through every sentence' Economist 'Wry, rich, deeply researched'
Patrick Radden Keefe
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
When Irving Berlin first conceived the song "White Christmas," he
envisioned it as a "throwaway" -- a satirical novelty number for a
vaudeville-style stage revue. By the time Bing Crosby introduced
the tune in the winter of 1942, it had evolved into something far
grander: the stately yuletide ballad that would become the world's
all-time top-selling and most widely recorded song.
In this vividly written narrative, Jody Rosen provides both the
fascinating story behind the making of America's favorite Christmas
carol and a cultural history of the nation that embraced it.
Berlin, the Russian-Jewish immigrant who became his adopted
country's greatest pop troubadour, had written his magnum opus --
what one commentator has called a "holiday "Moby-Dick"" -- a
timeless song that resonates with some of the deepest themes in
American culture: yearning for a mythic New England past, belief in
the magic of the "merry and bright" Christmas season, longing for
the havens of home and hearth. Today, the song endures not just as
an icon of the national Christmas celebration but as the artistic
and commercial peak of the golden age of popular song, a symbol of
the values and strivings of the World War II generation, and of the
saga of Jewish-American assimilation. With insight and wit, Rosen
probes the song's musical roots, uncovering its surprising
connections to the tradition of blackface minstrelsy and exploring
its unique place in popular culture through six decades of
recordings by everyone from Bing Crosby to Elvis Presley to *NSYNC.
"White Christmas" chronicles the song's legacy from jaunty
ragtime-era Tin Pan Alley to the elegant world of midcentury
Broadway and Hollywood, from the hardscrabble streets where Irving
Berlin was reared to the battlefields of World War II where
American GIs made "White Christmas" their wartime anthem, and from
the Victorian American past that the song evokes to the
twenty-first-century present where Berlin's masterpiece lives on as
a kind of secular hymn.
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