Two Wheels Good - Jody Rosen Gebunden

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 an d 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--