Two Wheels Good
The History and Mystery of the Bicycle (Shortlisted for the Sunday Times Sports Book Awards 2023)Select a format:
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Summary
**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
'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
Reviews
When I fell in love with riding a bike in New York City last year, what I found myself craving was a history-of the bicycle... that whoever wrote this history would find a way to make it personal and ruminative... Lo and behold: Jody Rosen has written that very book. My wish has come true and a door's been blown open. I got more than I knew I wanted
New York TImes