Two Wheels Good, Jody Rosen



There can’t be too many books celebrating the bicycle, though one always has to wonder what prompted the latest and what qualified the author to address the subject.  “Two Wheels Good” may have been inspired by the so-called bike boom during the pandemic, which the author of the book, Jody Rosen,  called “without question the largest in history.”  This surge of interest no doubt led him and Crown Publishing to think there would be an audience interested in reading another book passing itself off as a history of the bike. If nothing else he came up with a catchy title.

Rosen has written bicycle-related stories for the New York Times magazine and the New Yorker and claims to ride his bike every day around New York City, qualifications enough to write such a book.  He is an avid enough cyclist to proclaim “cycling is the essence of a New York existence…to live in New York without a bike is to only half-experience the city.”  

He doesn’t reveal his deep passion for the bike until the third to the last of the book’s sixteen chapters when he breaks from his reportorial mode and turns personal detailing his close relationship to the bike, which included a stint as a bicycle messenger in Boston one summer when he was nineteen.  As with many messengers, myself included, it was the best job he ever had, though he wasn’t particularly good at it. He rode so dreamily his dispatcher asked him, “Don’t you want to make money,” as one is paid by the delivery.  The job did confirm to him that he “didn’t want to be off a bicycle.”

The book might have had been more engaging if he had personalized it from the start rather than making it a series of what could be stand-alone magazine articles—venturing to Bangladesh to profile a rickshaw driver, to Scotland to profile the stunt rider Danny MacAskill, to Montana to profile a couple who met on the 1976 Bikecentennial coast-to-coast mass migration of cyclists and married, to an island in the Norwegian arctic in the dead of winter that is a bicycle haven, to Bhutan to document the unlikely bicycle scene in the Himalayas.  

He passes on the cliche of going to Copenhagen and Amsterdam and describing those bicycle idylls that all cities should aspire to, but does go to Beijing, a former bicycling stronghold, where the bicycle is being choked out by everyone now wanting to drive around in a car.  The bicycle is now regarded “as embarrassing, old-fashioned, ‘for losers,’ ‘for the poor.’”  Bike-share is trying to get people back on bikes, but it almost seems that as many bike-share bikes get thrown in rivers as are ridden.  

One chapter is sixteen pages of odd stories about the bicycle from newspaper clippings from the 1890s.  A story from the Nebraska State Journal quoted the president of the Women’s Rescue League that bicycle riding by women is “leading them headlong to the devil.”  She was seeking an act of Congress to forbid women to ride bikes.  If Amy Goodman had been around at the time she would have gladly given this dissenter a voice on Democracy Now if only to pose her favorite question, “What are you demanding?”

Rosen inserts a wide breadth of bicycling anecdotes, including Frank Zappa strumming a bicycle wheel on the Steve Allen show, speculating about the whereabouts of two exercycles on the Titanic, Annie Oakley blasting clay pigeons while riding a bicycle.  Though he pointedly warns early on that his  book will have nothing about bike racing, he manages to insert Maurice Garin, the winner of the first Tour de France.  

The book starts with an array of creation theories as to the origin of the bicycle, most of which he debunks, including the myth of Leonardo da Vinci having drawn one up.  There are way more claimants to being the inventor of the bicycle than one could imagine.  Even the Russians and Chinese join the fray, pointing to obscure countrymen as the first to create a bicycle despite all evidence pointing to a German, Karl Friedrich Drais, who concocted a two-wheeled device in 1817 that one could sit upon after propelling one’s self by foot.  Pedals came later added by a Frenchman in the 1860s.  So many books have been written about these early years, each seeking a fresh angle, I just wanted to skim over it all, wondering what Rosen would find to write about in the coming pages.

He devotes thirty-four pages, ten per cent of the book, to Barb Brushe and Bill Samsoe, letting them tell in their own words the story of their riding across the country in 1976 as part of an entourage of over four thousand cyclists in multiple small groups celebrating the Bicentennial.  Bill was a group leader and Barb was in a group just ahead of Bill’s.  They repeatedly crossed paths, making a connection that led to marriage.  Forty years later they repeated their crossing, though with a sag wagon and staying in hotels rather than camping.  In describing their first crossing Rosen says riders were continually “catching” flats, an unorthodox description of riders “suffering” flats.  Another red flag to his bicycling acumen is his acknowledgement in his “Personal History” chapter that “to this day I can barely patch an inner tube.”

He makes several passing references to the Critical Mass phenomenon that originated in San Francisco in 1992 and swept the world, but it’s not until his last chapter that he describes it in detail, though only giving it two pages, and never seemingly engaging in one himself.    After the first mention on page ten I checked the index to see if there would be more and was disappointed to see it wasn’t listed in the twelve page index.  Thus it came as a pleasant surprise when he did give it more than a nod.  It could have been one of those subjects, like racing, that he didn’t care to write about since it had been written about so thoroughly elsewhere.  It may have been overlooked in the index, but “corking” was not, a feature of Critical Masses, of cyclists blocking intersections holding bikes overhead so the critical mass of riders can continue flowing through.  The index also had other obscure references such as ball bearings and rain riding and ghost bikes.  

Curiously the book doesn’t include a bibliography though plenty of books are mentioned in his forty-three pages of footnotes.  Two of the footnotes are included with his email address if one would like him to send a copy of an article he had found.  I’m still awaiting a response. 

There is no mention of his fellow New York bicycle devotee David Byrne nor reference to his book “Bicycle Diaries” or his recent show on Broadway that included bicycling.  Simone Beauvoir merits a mention and Steve Jobs and Hitler and Henry Miller and Mark Twain and, of course, H. G. Welles.

He doesn’t harp on the bicycle as being a savior for the environment as much as he could.  He veers off on several tangents that the bicycle hasn’t always been good for the environment since producing bicycles causes environmental damage and exploitation of workers, rather irrelevant issues in a book titled “Two Wheels Good.”  But it is his bent to embrace all, as he does when he chooses “she” rather than the standard “he” for a generalization of all humans.  

One senses at times he ventures off topic to fill up his quota of pages, such as two pages on a relative of the stunt rider MacAskill who was a giant—seven feet nine inches tall.  He also includes several paragraphs on Drais not relevant to the bicycle story, but interesting, fleeing Germany for Brasil in 1822 because his father a judge made an unpopular decision.  One often can’t help but to think, “That’s interesting, but what does it have to do with this book?”

It’s all made up though with his occasional rapturous endorsements of riding the bike.  It can be dangerous he acknowledges, especially in New York City traffic, “but to trudge through your days without biking—that’s no way to live.”