Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle

A panoramic revisionist portrait of the nineteenth-century invention that is transforming the twenty-first-century world“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.”—Patrick Radden Keefe, New York Times bestselling author of Empire of PainThe 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