Two Wheels Good
The History and Mystery of the Bicycle
Jody Rosen
Having read it
★★★☆☆
Skipped and skimmed parts of it as from four or five chapters in as I was getting worn out by the weight of its seemingly wannabe writerly words, as what pace it might have established just seemed continually unsteady and somewhat inconsistent in its telling.
Ambitious in its intent and scope and despite telling of some intriguing aspects of bicycle history – boneshakers and velocipedes included – it seems to lacks a cohesive whole, a decent purpose like a journey that you can feel satisfied in having taken.
Learned a couple of things from the odd fact littered amongst its prose but despite wanting to like this book initially, because of its cycling subject, it is not that good a read.
A good passage
Many of us take comfort in the knowledge that, by riding bikes, we are making an ethical and environmental choice. But bicycles do not float free from the realities of their creation: the resource extraction, energy consumption, and human labor involved in the manufacturing of a bike exacts a cost. The two-wheeler leaves a footprint.
Just how big a footprint is hard to say. The bicycle industry is global and byzantine. Most of today’s bicycles include parts manufactured in several different countries. Researchers who have attempted to write about the life cycle of bicycles have found it difficult to follow the supply chains to their origins – to pinpoint the open pit mine in Guinea or Ghana or China where the bauxite ore, the primary source of an aluminium bicycle frame, was originally dug up, or to identify where in the world the natural rubber in a bike tire was harvested. Suffice it to say, the extractive industries involved in the earliest stages of a bicycle’s life cycle have – to be generous – spotty environmental and human rights records, and it is sentimental to suppose that bikes, by virtue of being bikes, arrive in this world clean and green. Nor should we be naive about the conditions under which bicycles are assembled in factories. Journalists have uncovered labor abuses in the bicycle industry, including the exploitation of child bike factory workers in such places as Cambodia and Bangladesh.