Two wheels good

£10.99

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 we live on a bicycle planet. 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.

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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

Additional information

Weight 0.329 kg
Dimensions 19.8 × 13 × 2.6 cm
Author

Publisher

Imprint

Cover

Paperback

Pages

xvii, 396

Language

English

Edition
Dewey

629.227209 (edition:23)

Readership

General – Trade / Code: K