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“Excellent .

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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 YorkerThe 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.