Two Wheels Good
The History and Mystery of the Bicycle (Shortlisted for the Sunday Times Sports Book Awards 2023)
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
**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
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This high-flying debut history by New York Times Magazine contributor Rosen captures the allure of riding a bike. Through vivid anecdotes, such as how the design of the bicycle led the Wright brothers to invent the airplane, Rosen makes clear how impactful the invention has been for humankind. Baron Karl von Drais, a minor German nobleman, produced the first bike in 1817, and the design was repeatedly improved upon in subsequent decades. For example, in 1888, Belfast-based veterinarian John Boyd Dunlop replaced the solid rubber tires on his son's tricycle with "inflated rubber tubes, sheathed in canvas and an additional outer layer of sheet rubber," leading to the widespread adoption of pneumatic tires. Rosen is equally fascinating in describing the bicycle's changing status in countries like China, which produces more bikes per year than the world builds cars; the "Great Covid-19 Bicycle Boom" that saw people "converging on bike lanes and patronizing cycle-share systems in unprecedented numbers"; and the archetype of "bright-eyed children, bicycling through idyllic suburbs" seen in movies and TV shows like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Stranger Things. Witty prose, exhaustive research, and Rosen's contagious enthusiasm ensure that this standout history will appeal to cyclists and non-cyclists alike.
