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, journalist and critic Jody Rosen reshapes our understanding of this ubiquitous machine, an ever-present force in humanity's journey 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 climate change.
Readers meet unforgettable characters: feminist rebels 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 aborad the International Space Station.
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.
