Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle (Unabridged) Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle (Unabridged)

Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle (Unabridged‪)‬

    • 3.5 • 2 Ratings
    • $16.99

    • $16.99

Publisher Description

A panoramic revisionist portrait of the nineteenth-century invention that is transforming the twenty-first-century world

“Excellent . . . calls to mind Bill Bryson, John McPhee, Rebecca Solnit.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker

The bicycle is a vestige of the Victorian era, seemingly at odds with our age of smartphones and ride-sharing apps and driverless cars. Yet we live on a bicycle planet. Across the world, more people travel by bicycle than any other form of transportation. Almost anyone can learn to ride a bike—and nearly everyone does.

In Two Wheels Good, journalist and critic Jody Rosen reshapes our understanding of this ubiquitous machine, an ever-present force in humanity’s life and dream life—and a flash point in culture wars—for more than two hundred years. Combining history, reportage, travelogue, and memoir, Rosen’s book sweeps across centuries and around the globe, unfolding the bicycle’s saga from its invention in 1817 to its present-day renaissance as a “green machine,” an emblem of sustainability 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 prospector who pedaled across the frozen Yukon to join the Klondike gold rush, a Bhutanese king who races mountain bikes in the Himalayas, a cycle-rickshaw driver who navigates the seething streets of the world’s fastest-growing megacity, 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 clichés 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.

GENRE
History
NARRATOR
SPH
Sean Patrick Hopkins
LANGUAGE
EN
English
LENGTH
12:50
hr min
RELEASED
2022
May 24
PUBLISHER
Random House Audio
SIZE
831.2
MB

Listeners Also Bought

Humankind Humankind
2020
The Code Breaker (Unabridged) The Code Breaker (Unabridged)
2021
The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder (Unabridged) The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder (Unabridged)
2023
The Pioneers (Unabridged) The Pioneers (Unabridged)
2019
The Wright Brothers (Unabridged) The Wright Brothers (Unabridged)
2015
21 Lessons for the 21st Century (Unabridged) 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (Unabridged)
2018