Two Wheels Good

SHORTLISTED FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES SPORTS BOOK AWARDS 2023'Full of delightful anecdotes and interviews and fascinating historical tales' Mail on SundayA 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