Two Wheels Good : The History and Mystery of the Bicycle (Shortlisted for the Sunday Times Sports Book Awards 2023)

Author: Rosen, Jody

c 1800 to c 1900

Published on 17 August 2023 by Vintage Publishing (Vintage) in the United Kingdom.

Paperback | 416 pages
198 x 130 x 29 | 340g

**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