Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle

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