Two Wheels Good The History And Mystery Of The Bicycle Jody Rosen by Jody Rosen 9780804141499, 9782021054101, 2021054101, 0804141495, 2021054102 instant download after payment.

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)

The bicycle is a vestige of the Victorian era, seemingly at odds with our age of smartphones & ride-sharing apps & 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—& nearly everyone does. 

In Two Wheels Good, journalist & critic Jody Rosen reshapes our understanding of this ubiquitous machine, an ever-present force in humanity’s life & dream life—& a flash point in culture wars—for more than two hundred years. Combining history, reportage, travelogue, & memoir, Rosen’s book sweeps across centuries & 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 & 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 & peers into its future, challenging myths & clichés while uncovering cycling’s connection to colonial conquest & the gentrification of cities. But the book is also a love letter: a reflection on the sensual & spiritual pleasures of bike riding & an ode to an engineering marvel—a wondrous vehicle whose passenger is also its engine.