[ARETE] Two wheels good

[Duncan Jamieson]

All,
Please find attached and below my review of Jody Rosen's *Two Wheels Good.*
Thanks
Duncan

Rosen, Jody.  *Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle*.  New
York: Crown, 2022.  xii + 397 pp.  Illustrations, Notes, Index. $28.99

Reviewed by Duncan R. Jamieson, Ph.D.  Department of History, Ashland
University, Ashland Ohio, USA

Knowing my interest in sport and more specifically bicycling, a colleague
alerted me to Jill Lepore’s recent review of Jody Rosen’s, *Two Wheels Good*
in *The New Yorker* (May 30 2022).  Rosen is a native New Yorker, a
contributing writer for the *New York Times Magazine* and a bicyclist;
Lepore is a professor of history at Harvard University, a staff writer for *The
New Yorker* and a bicyclist.  Both have excellent cycling bona fides,
though she might have an edge as she was “doored” when J. K. Rowling opened
the rear door of the stretch limousine in which she was riding.  Like Rosen
and Lepore, I began riding as a child and continue awheel today.  My
bicycling bona fides are represented by tens of thousands of miles,
including dozens of centuries (100-mile tours in a day), an 800-mile
unsupported credit card tour from Ashland, Ohio to Provincetown,
Massachusetts, and a 3,200-mile supported transcontinental ride from Los
Angeles, California to Boston, Massachusetts. However, I am a much more
cautious rider than either Rosen or Lepore, only being grazed by a car once
and falling very few times, even including my childhood riding.  In
addition to book chapters and articles, mostly on long distance bicycle
travel, my monograph, *The Self-Propelled Voyager *(2015,  New York: Rowman
and Littlefield) is a narrative history examining the reality that despite
the massive technological advancements in cycles, equipment, communication,
clothing and other incidentals, the actual experience of cycling is
remarkedly similar today as to what it was almost 150 years ago when Thomas
Stevens set off from San Francisco to become the first person to take a
bicycle around the world.

Though Lepore refers to Rosen’s book as “a set of quirky and kaleidoscopic
stories” (60), a brilliant summary of the book, the majority of her article
reviews her life on two wheels.  While *Two Wheels* is interesting and
worth the time it takes to read, I do take exception to the hyperbole the
publisher is using to promote it.  It seems the subtitle is more the
creation of a clever marketer than the author; the book is certainly not
about “the history and mystery of the bicycle.”  Rosen himself makes it
clear this is not a history of either the bicycle or bicycling, though the
opening few chapters do offer a reasonable though sketchy look at the early
days.  Relative to mystery, the questions regarding who came up with the
improvements between Karl Von Drais’ 1817 hobby horse and the arrival of
the safety in the late 1880s are rather clearly accepted by cycle
historians, though these intervening years are murky at best, with several
countries making claims to their role in cycling’s development, something
Rosen doesn’t discuss.  The bold type statement on the jacket flap that
this is “a panoramic revisionist portrait of the nineteenth-century
invention that is transforming the twenty-first-century world” is an
incredible stretch for even the most optimistic cyclists.  Then, one of the
quotes on the back cover suggests, this is “wide-ranging and [somewhat]
inquisitive” but in no way is it “an entire library of books on the
bicycle.”  The book is a collection of chapters covering a number of issues
related to the cycle and its place in Western and Eastern societies.  In a
rather convoluted fashion Rosen does consider the divide between the mostly
white, middle-class Westerners who ride because it is enjoyable and
convenient, and the desperately impoverished and marginalized in Eastern
societies who use the bicycle because it is the only transportation they
can afford.  This ignores the sizeable underclass in the United States and
likely other Western countries forced to cycle because there is no viable
alternative.  It also overlooks Eastern elites who use the wheel, by
choice, for pleasure.  Unfortunately, Rosen does not follow through on this
distinction, though it is something that has a long history in cycling.  When
first introduced, the ordinary and then the safety were the province of the
middle and upper classes who had both the leisure time and disposable
income to enjoy the gratification that comes from traveling using one’s own
power.  By the last days of the 19th century, however, overproduction of
new bicycles and a thriving market for used wheels slashed prices, along
with the allure, long before the internal combustion engine pushed the
bicycle to the edge of the road.  A generation later none of this deterred
the middle-class English civil servant, Bernard Newman, from cycling
through every country in Europe in the middle third of the 20th
century.  Frequently,
people assumed he was too poor to travel by any other means, which was most
definitely NOT the case.  A similar feeling in the early 21st century
confronted Englishwoman Anne Mustoe as she rode through the American
southwest along the eight-hundred-mile Santa Fe Trail.  When she stopped
late in the day looking for accommodations people assumed she needed help
with payment—why else would she be bicycling?  She always politely refused,
explaining she rode by choice, not necessity. These are only two of many
examples of how, at least in much of the Western world, the bicycle has
been and continues to be viewed as either a children’s toy or something
used by a small minority of adult whackos.

 Following a prologue which connects the highly popular, collectable late 19
th century bicycle posters displaying scantily clothed nymphs with
different manufacturers wheels and an introduction connecting bicycles with
space Rosen has fifteen disparate chapters on the bicycle.  He correctly
distinguishes between cycling in the United States where the wheel is seen
as a children’s toy by most or as something for white-collar, middle-class
Caucasians with disposable income and free time.  Europeans are more likely
to accept it as an appropriate method of transportation as well as leisure.
In the East the bicycle is more a utilitarian machine to move people and
goods to power the economy.  Worldwide, bicycle production exceeds the
number of automobiles by perhaps as much as twenty percent, though both are
built and bought for work and/or for leisure.  *Two Wheels* discusses the
place of the bicycle in societies as culturally, economically and
geographically diverse as the Netherlands, Bangladesh, the United States,
Bhutan and China.  While interesting vignettes, they do not explore the
international intricacies of the cycle.   The 23,000,000 Dutch own and ride
28,000,000 bicycles (approximately three times the number of automobiles
owned and operated by the Dutch), commuting, shopping, riding to school,
going on holiday.  Conversely in the United States, the number of
automobiles approaches but does not equal the population, and automobiles
are not evenly distributed.  Rosen devotes an entire chapter to the poor
working conditions of pedicab operators in Bangladesh; however deplorable
they may be, his trope overlooks the pedicab operators who ply their trade
in London, New York or any number of other Western cities.  Granted, in the
former pedicab drivers are a staple of transportation for the customer and
income for the operator, while in the West for the customer they are a
tourist attraction, likely something that the operator (invariably young)
is doing on the side while trying to figure out what’s next.   Unfortunately,
this distinction is never explored.  In Chapter 9, “Uphill,” Rosen opens
with the Bhutanese king who enjoys cycling so much he abdicated the throne
to his eldest son in 2006 so he could spend his spare time cycling. He then
describes The Tour of the Dragon, an annual 165.5-mile cycle race that
attracts top contenders from around the world.  In Chapter 11, “Cross
Country,” Rosen provides a bit of background on the origins of Adventure
Cycling, though the majority of the chapter focuses on the love story
description of the 1976 Bikecentennial ride, where a couple of thousand
riders left trailheads on the Pacific Ocean to cross the United States to
commemorate the two hundredth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration
of Independence.  At the same time a similar sized group left the Atlantic
headed west to meet, wave and pass the riders going east.  Among the
eastward riders a man and woman met, fell in love and married two years
later; they then reprise their lives, careers and cycling adventures.  Yet,
even though a New Yorker by birth, upbringing, employment and current
status, Rosen seems not to know of the Great Five Boro Bike Tour, held for
decades on the first Sunday in May when New York City closes major arteries
to allow 30,000 plus cyclists to ride traffic-free through each
borough.  Perhaps
the best part of The Five Boro is cycling south on the Brooklyn Queens
Expressway cruising freely at twenty miles an hour and looking left to see
drivers crawling along, snarled in traffic on the north bound lanes!  The
last chapter, 15, “Mass Movement,” describes Critical Mass, Black Lives
Matter and China, none with sufficient detail to explore their significance
to cycling and quality of life.  Rosen points out that China historically
had been perhaps the most bicycle friendly nation on earth.  Then in a
great leap forward to emulate the West, it pushed the cycles and their
riders to the sideline to make way for the automobile and massive pollution.
After a generation it seems that China is recognizing the folly of this,
and like many Western governments is trying to make its cities more cycle
friendly and livable.

>From its earliest predecessor, the Draisine, to today’s electric assisted
bicycles, the machine has always been a lightening-rod for diametrically
opposed opinions on its value and its place.  Either the most efficient
transportation device ever invented or a children’s toy, either the last
best hope to save humanity from the apocalyptic devastation of climate
change or a sinister plot to sideline the individual’s right to double or
triple park on already overly congested streets, Rosen offers a few bits of
enlightenment but with little depth.  He cites P. J. O’Rourke and his
misanthropic views of bicycles, as well as Harrison Salisbury’s testimony
to Congress on how the North Vietnamese used the bicycle to defeat the
Americans.  But it’s obvious he knows nothing of Daniel Behrman’s *Man Who
Loved Bicycles* (New York: Harper’s Magazine Press, 1973) in which this
self-professed autophobe described how cars were killing cities like Paris
and New York.

While Rosen clearly understands the class divide created by the middle
class who ride by choice as opposed to the underclass who ride by
necessity, and while he has interesting anecdotes, including his
experiences on Gotham’s roads, if the reader is interested in the place of
the bicycle, I would recommend David Herlihy’s *The Bicycle*, Melody
Hoffman, *Bike Lanes are White Lanes*, James Longhurst, *Bike Battles*,
Evan Friss, *The Cycling City*, J. Harry Wray, *Pedal Power*, my *The
Self-Propelled Voyager*, or any of Joe Kurmaskie’s zany first person
bicycle adventures.  The last fifteen or so years has seen a dramatic
increase in the number of books on the history, place and meaning of the
bicycle—these are just a few that would be better choices.



Remember to smell the roses as you recumber past

Duncan R. Jamieson, Ph. D.
Professor of History
Book Review Editor
*AETHLON: The Journal of Sport Literature*
Ashland University
Ashland, OH  44805
USA
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