Two Wheels Good

Author Jody Rosen
Narrator Sean Patrick Hopkins
Publisher Random House
Run Time 12 hours and 49 minutes
Format Audio
Genre Bicycles and non-motorised transport: general interest and maintenance, Biography and non-fiction prose, Cycling: general and touring, History, Impact of science and technology on society, Inventions and inventors, Memoirs, Science: general issues, Self-help, personal development and practical advice, Self-sufficiency and ‘green’ lifestyle, Social and cultural history, Sports and Active outdoor recreation, Travel and holiday, Travel writing.

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

The bicycle is a vestige of the Victorian era, seemingly out of pace with our age of smartphones and ridesharing apps and driverless cars. Yet we live on a bicycle planet. Across the world, more people travel by bicycle than by any other form of transportation. Almost anyone can learn to ride a bike - and nearly everyone does.

In Two Wheels Good, writer and critic Jody Rosen reshapes our understanding of this ubiquitous machine, an ever-present force in humanity's life and dreamlife, and a flashpoint in culture wars for more for than two hundred years. Combining history, reportage, travelogue, and memoir, Rosen sweeps across centuries and around the globe, unfolding the bicycle's saga from its invention in 1817 to its present-day renaissance as a 'green machine,' an emblem of sustainability in a world afflicted by pandemic and climate change. Readers meet unforgettable characters: feminist rebels who steered bikes to the barricades in the 1890s, a prospector who pedaled across the frozen Yukon to join the Klondike gold rush, a Bhutanese king who races mountain bikes in the Himalayas, a cycle rickshaw driver who navigates the seething streets of the world's fastest-growing megacity, astronauts who ride a floating bicycle in zero gravity aboard the International Space Station.

Two Wheels Good examines the bicycle's past and peers into its future, challenging myths and clichés, while uncovering cycling's connection to colonial conquest and the gentrification of cities. But the book is also a love letter: a reflection on the sensual and spiritual pleasures of bike riding and an ode to an engineering marvel - a wondrous vehicle whose passenger is also its engine.

© Jody Rosen 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022

Critics Review

When I fell in love with riding a bike in New York City last year, what I found myself craving was a history-of the bicycle… that whoever wrote this history would find a way to make it personal and ruminative… Lo and behold: Jody Rosen has written that very book. My wish has come true and a door’s been blown open. I got more than I knew I wanted

New York TImes

Two Wheels Good is full of interesting moments…and is often written with real verve… his [Rosen’s] enthusiasm for what is sometimes described as mankind’s “noblest invention” is infectious

Times Literary Supplement

The engaging tone of Rosen’s memoir-travelogue-history is the grim cheerfulness of the urban cyclist. He gives a vivid sense of the cinematic pleasures of cycling through a city.

Spectator

A jovial historical narrative … Rosen rightly get us to expand our narrow Western image of the bicycle to a global perspective [and] is skilled yet selective in navigating the complex and rich history of the bicycle, taking us across continents and through centuries … a thoroughly enjoyable, and sometimes surprising read

Cycle

The bicycle has been loved and loathed… Rosen’s vibrant history explores it all

BBC History Magazine

Comprehensive . . . [Two Wheels Good] often feels like a leisurely ride, full of spontaneous detours into unexpected delight. But what makes the book essential is its rigorous reporting

The Atlantic

The best thing I’ve ever read on a single subject… With curiosity, conscientiousness, and an exquisitely light touch, [Joden] makes a convincing case that the story of the bike is the story of modern life

Lauren Collins, author of When in French

Wide-ranging and inquisitive, Two Wheels Good is like an entire library of books on the bicycle

Lucy Sante, author of Low Life

Takes us on a ride-across the centuries and around the globe, through startling history and vivid first-person reporting-offering not just a wry, rich, deeply researched meditation on the bicycle and our relationship to it, but the headlong rush of cruising on two wheels into the unknown

Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Empire of Pain and Say Nothing

The stores are filled with books on little things that changed everything, but Jody Rosen’s new book offers us a real little thing-the simple bicycle-that really did change everything, from the shape of our streets to the inner life of our imaginations… this is social history as it ought to be written: funny, precise, surprising, anti-dogmatic and unafraid of following a story, brakes off, to wherever the tale might want to glide

Adam Gopnik, author of Paris to the Moon

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