Two Wheels Good

“The real feat of this book is that it takes us on a ride—across the centuries and around the globe, through startling history and vivid first-person reporting—offering not just a wry, rich, deeply researched meditation on the bicycle and our relationship to it, but also the headlong rush of cruising on two wheels into the unknown.”—Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Empire of Pain

“When I fell in love with riding a bike in New York City, what I found myself craving was a history—of the bicycle, but also of that love, one that itself radiated passion, moved like the wind, believed in the power of adventure. But I’m greedy: I wished that whoever wrote this history would find a way to make it personal and ruminative, to bring cities and eras to life. Jody Rosen has written that very book. I got more than I knew I wanted.”—Wesley Morris, Pulitzer Prize–winning critic, The New York Times

“Two Wheels Good is better than a book has any right to be, the best thing I’ve ever read on a single subject. With curiosity, conscientiousness, and an exquisitely light touch, Rosen makes a convincing case that the story of the bike is the story of modern life.”—Lauren Collins, author of When in French

“Showing how the bicycle has been by turns mechanical, utilitarian and political, a feminist engine, and a proletarian necessity—only to end as the modern city dweller’s green-dream vehicle—this is social history as it ought to be written: funny, precise, surprising, anti-dogmatic, and unafraid of following a story, brakes off, to wherever the tale might want to glide.”—Adam Gopnik, author of Paris to the Moon

“Wide-ranging and inquisitive, Two Wheels Good is like an entire library of books on the bicycle.”—Lucy Sante, author of Low Life

Auteur

Jody Rosen

Texte du rabat

"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. Combining history, reportage, travelogue, and memoir, Rosen 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"--

Résumé
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.

Échantillon de lecture
**1

The Bicycle Window

St. Giles’ is a small parish church that sits on a patch of pleasantly shaded land in the village of Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire, twenty-five miles west of London. There has been a house of worship on this site since Saxon times. The oldest part of the church building, its rough-hewn stone tower, dates from the period of the Norman Conquest.

The place is also holy ground for literati of a certain age and inclination. It was at St. Giles’, in 1742, that Thomas Gray conceived “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” a meditation on death and bereavement that was once among the most celebrated poems in the English language, a fixture of syllabi until tastes swung to less orotund verse. Today, Gray himself is in the churchyard, in a grave marked by an altar-shaped tombstone that sits just outside a chapel window on the building’s east façade. St. Giles’ is a lovely place, tranquil and picturesque, an ideal spot for a rest—eternal or merely momentary. If you find yourself there on a mild evening, you will take in a setting little different from the one immortalized by Gray:

Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,

And all the air a solemn stillness holds,

Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,

And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds.

My visit to St. Giles’ came in the spring, on a day of warm breezes and pouring sunshine. The panorama—church, churchyard greenery, surrounding countryside—was unreasonably pretty, and as I strolled the long path that snakes through St. Giles’ grounds, the birds were singing so wildly that I punched up the Voice Memos app on my iPhone and made a recording. Looming about one hundred yards to the south of the church was the Manor House, a sixteenth-century estate once owned by Queen Elizabeth I, and later by Sir Thomas Penn, the son of William Penn, Pennsylvania’s founder. For an American who had spent little time in the leafy home counties but many hours reading nineteenth-century novels and watching costume-drama adaptations of those novels, the scenery was exotic but familiar. I half-expected to see Dame Maggie Smith bustling out of the church in period dress.

The person who materialized instead was St. Giles’ minister, Reverend Harry Latham. With a couple of adjustments to his wardrobe, Latham h…