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These books represent the yin and yang of bicycle guides.
Bicycle! is dense and technical. Heels on Wheels is charming and breezy.
Bicycle! has 19 chapters with headings like Drivetrains, Control Cables and Hubs.
Heels on Wheels has 6 chapters with titles such as “How to Incorporate Cycling into Your Lifestyle” and “Parking (Or, How to Ensure Your Bike Isn’t Stolen”).
Many books discuss the perils of highways: the noise, the pollution, the way they chunk up communities. This book makes the dangers more personal, more visceral, recounting the many deaths that have happened alongside interstate highways in the United States. “More highways meant more travel, more movement, more anonymity— all conducive to criminality,” states writer […]
Cyclorama is a visual feast. It includes hundreds of photos of bicycles and of people riding bicycles. You’ll see men, women, boys, girls, people with dwarfism, amputees, toddlers, old folks, Tanzanians and Cubans all riding bicycles. You’ll see page after page of sparkling clean bicycles, not thin-wheeled racers but get-around-town bikes. This book is akin […]
Volkswagen (yep, the car company) has a project called The Fun Theory that aims to encourage better behavior through playfulness. They’ve found that more people will take the stairs if they are painted like piano keys and make sounds when stepped on. Also, people will throw more litter into a garbage can that makes sound […]
Joyride tells the story of how Portland, Oregon got started on the path to becoming the Copenhagen, the Amsterdam, the bicycling mecca of the United States. It focuses on the years from 1993 to 1999 when author Mia Birk worked as the city’s Bicycle Program Coordinator. Portland in the early 1990s was car-centered like most […]
“When you design streets solely for cars, people die as a result. The underlying conditions that are responsible for those deaths are rarely or never challenged. The victims often get blamed for their own injuries or deaths.”i The above quote refers to the case of Raquel Nelson, a US Atlanta-area mother who was recently convicted […]
Book Review by Kelly Nelson There is always room for a book about bicycles as transportation in North America so kudos to editor Amy Walker and publisher New World Library for putting out this book where the words lycra, competition, racing and Lance Armstrong do not appear in the index. The contributors to this friendly, […]
“The automobile as a death dealing instrument was unanimously decided upon as the greatest present day menace to public safety.” These words were not written in 1960s Holland or 1970s New York City but in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1920. This fascinating book chronicles the early chapters of the anti-car movement in the United States between […]
Stop Signs is probably the most comprehensive assessment of the power of the automobile I’ve yet read. It’s a history lesson on the car, and its rapid evolution and a field guide to Homo Automotivus. As the subtitle suggests, it focuses on the economic, social and environmental, but also neatly summarises topics like health, psychology, […]
If I could time travel into the past, I’d like to visit the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan where Mexico City stands today. I’d also like to be a guest in a Viennese parlor in 1793 listening to Beethoven play the piano. And I’d like to spend time in an American city after the bicycle had […]
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