Walkable City Rules

Walkaable City Rules: 101 Steps to Making Better Places
© 2018 Jeff Speck
312 pages

In Walkable Cities, Jeff Speck argued for the virtues of a city optimized for pedestrian travel, and offered ten general guidelines  for making it happen -- from checking forces that destroy walkability, to further empowering pedestrians through connections to other transportation.  That pitch was made to popular audiences, but its success allowed Speck to produce a sequel which went into more detail. That sequel is Walkable City Rules, a collection of one hundred (and one) ways to humanize the  modern city. These rules are not idealistic goals; they have already  been put into practice, and there's nothing here that some city can't take home.  The rules offer a variety of positive steps cities can take, supported by data to make a case for implementing them.

Speck begins this book with  ways for concerned citizens, public officials, and planners to "sell" walkability to their audience -- on the merits of  wealth, health, equity, climate change, and community -- before moving to the array of urban design tweaks . Making a city walkable is a complex challenge -- not because walkable cities in themselves are difficult to make, but because the last half-century of development has not had walkability in mind, and cities now have to contend not with a blank slate, but vast acreages of badly designed urbanism.  Complexity lies in the fact that walkability is not a matter of good sidewalks; walkability is all about connections between where people are and where they want to be.  That means the question of walkability has a great deal to do with housing, for instance, which is why mixed used development  and inclusionary zoning (mixing affordable  developments in with the more lucrative ones) are so important.   It means that commerce has to be nurtured in the right ways, too, by reducing one-way streets and having parking policies that ensure quick lot turnover.

 Speck often pitches his advice to cities on the basis of making the most of what they have, converting a superfluity of extra-wide lanes into a more modest number devoted to cars, making room for bike lanes and trees. (Trees are vital to a city, Speck argues -- not only does their presence slow down cars, but depending on placement they can serve as a barrier between cars and pedestrians, while at the time providing shelter to said pedestrians.)     But the advice isn't all about engineering: Speck also addresses politics, by advising would be reformers to turn the fire chief into an ally instead of an adversary, and  to avoid thinking of pedestrians, cyclists, and motorists as opposing factions: instead,  he advocates using the language of "people walking", "people biking", and "people driving" to emphasize that  human behavior is dynamic and most of us will shift in how we use the city throughout the day -- driving to work, say, and then walking a block or two for errands or lunch.

There's a lot in here, and admittedly it isn't for everyone: Speck commented in an interview that it's really meant for the Strong Towns audience, that is --  city planners, engineers, officials, and citizens passionate about  implications of the built environment for civic life, public health, and private flourishing.  I was, however, disappointed in Speck's occasional abuse of "teabaggers" -- and surprised, given that Speck opens the book with an argument for walkability on the merits of fiscal responsibility. Considering that most of the damage done to cities in the last half century has precipitated by ill-advised federal policies (interstates gutting cities, for instance),  wooing libertarians with walkability would be a cinch.  Instead,  Speck indulges in the same unhelpful us-vs-them mentality he warned his readers against.   Considering his camaraderie with members of the Strong Towns movement, however (who vary from sweater-vested Republicans to Oregon hippies), I don't think it's deep-seated contempt.  In any case, the good ideas argued for in this book far surpass hiccups in the sales pitch.

Related:

• Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America One Step at a Time, Jeff Speck  
• Happy City: Transforming Our Lives through Urban Design, Charles Montgomery
• Suburban Nation:  The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream, DPZ and Jeff Speck

Fear, bikes, and NaNoWriMo

Happy Monday! (Or Monday evening, depending on where you are...)

My NaNoWriMo is off to a promising start, as I've been logging just over 4,000 words per day, well over the 1667 minimum average requirement.   That is completely  unprecedented for me; usually I have a strong first couple of days, and two weeks in I'm struggling and just typing stream of consciousness garbage to make any wordcount headway at all.    I think the amount of time the particulars of this story have been rattling around in my head has helped grease the runners, so to speak, and I'm going to ride this lead as far as I can.  Having a five-point overview with a partial sketch of the narrative also helps.   Essentially I have an ensemble group of four factions (a fifth will be introduced at the climax) and am visiting each faction-figure once in turn,  a la Harry Turtledove.  I'm 1.5 "turns" in.

Last week I finished a couple of books that I won't be dwelling on in a full review. I should at least mention them, however. The first, Fear, is a history of the first year of the Trump administration, or rather a review of some of the more alarming episodes of that period like the twitter war with the Kim cult, the creation of an economic policy cut from 18th century mercantilist playbooks, and the ongoing chaos of interior organization.   Like Fire and Fury this is less an expose than a recap, as we've all seen this unfold in public and even Trump supporters I know aren't sure how to make sense of everything that comes out of DC these days.

The second book I finished in the week was Bikeonomics, a bit of bike advocacy which hails bicycles' salulatory effect on health, the urban environment, and the bottom line . Unfortunately, I've encountered all that before through On Bikes,  so it was a bit of preaching to the choir for me.

Amsterdam

Amsterdam: A History of the World's Most Liberal City
© 2013 Russell Shorto
369 pages

In the early 14th century, a group of fisher-folk around the Amstel river came together with a dream: to build a place where people could smoke weed and bicycle to their heart's content.  And so they built a dam, and canals, and a town, and they called it Amsterdam. And they all lived happily ever after, except for the people who toked and cycled simultaneously, because they fell into the canals.

...well, okay. Not really. But there were fishermen, and there was a dam.  Amsterdam: A History of the World's Most Liberal City  reviews the history of the city which took its name from that dam, though it focuses more on Amsterdam's culture of liberality than municipal matters. That culture begins not in the 1960s or even the enlightenment period, but at the very beginning.

Most European cities can point back to a spot of land, the center of the old town, and say "Here is it where it began."  Not so with Amsterdam, which had to be reclaimed from the sea itself, by dredging rivers, redirecting water through canals, building dykes, and driving massive of wood into the Earth to secure a foundation for buildings.  This effort was a joint private-communal affair, as people worked as a corporation to accomplish and maintain projects, but held the results -- the parcels of land raised from the sea--  as private family possessions. Amsterdam's peculiar origins gave the city a unique character, writes Russell Shorto.  It fell outside the feudal system that governed the rest of western Europe, sharply curbing the influence of any native aristocracy, and priming it to reject them totally when cities grew and political authority became a matter of public debate.  The relatively shallow roots of feudalism's cultural authority made it much easier to embrace a  social policy of gedogen -- a game tolerance of difference or vice, so long as it wasn't aggressive.  This tolerance made Amsterdam  a refuge for persecuted minorities (exiled Spanish Jews) and minorities who would love to do the persecuting if the shoe was on the other foot (English Puritans). during the medieval-industrial transition

.Amsterdam's geography meant that it could not be a city with vast estates;  although many of its citizens were staggeringly rich during Amsterdam's golden age, when it was a trading titan that gave its sister-nation England painful competition,  even the wealthy would live in relatively modest townhouses. The broad outlines of Amsterdamer, or at least Dutch, history may be known -- if nothing else, at least the Dutch provinces' early participation in the Protestant movement, and their war of rebellion against the Spanish Hapburgs.  Amsterdam was slow to be caught up in the protestant tide,  as a medieval miracle made it an object of pilgrimages, and made the city as a whole more Catholic -- at least, for a time, before it was quickly supplanted by liberalism. Although the word "liberal" means apparently opposite things on either side of the Atlantic, Shorto holds that both meanings were originally rooted in the supremacy of the individual, and Amsterdam can claim to embody that cause more than any other city.  Compare it to the cradle of Anglo-American democracy, the  home of the House of Commons:  London's streets once fell under the shadow of cathedrals and the Tower; now they falls under skyscrapers.  Amsterdam, however, is a city not of skyscrapers and massive complexes, but of buildings that have remained at the human scale. Its innards, too, have remained human: its streets are dominated by human figures on bicycles, not oversized for speeding automobiles.

Although this is certainly an enjoyable history of Amsterdam's contribution to the human existance,  particularly  on its progress at achieving the golden mean between individual and community life,  those who are curious about Amsterdam's physical expression will probably be a little disappointed. The physical form of the city is covered early on, but after that municipal matters take a distant back seat to the evolving social history. Admittedly, most readers are probably more interested in reading about cars than about canals and such, but I thought it was very odd that Shorto didn't dwell on the rescue of the 'human city' from cars in the 1970s. 

Related:
In the City of Bikes: The Story of the Amsterdam Cyclist, Pete Jordan
The Embarrassment of Riches, Simon Schama. Not one I've read yet, but it's about the Dutch Republic's golden age.

The Wheels of Chance

The Wheels of Chance: A Bicycling Idyll
© 1896 H.G. Wells
193 pages

What an odd little story! Begin with one J. Hoopdriver, a draper's assistant who lives for nothing but spare opportunities to ride his bicycle -- or rather, to crash repeatedly on his bicycle, banging up his legs but still delighting in sheer momentum. Mr. Hoopdriver, at the novel's beginning, is finally embarking on his yearly vacation: a cycling tour in England. Immediately he spies a beautiful woman, crashes dramatically, and earns her pity and his own chagrin. He chances to see her again, later on, and this time in the company of another fellow who claims to be her brother. His love-sickness not withstanding, Hoopdriver can tell that something's amiss, especially after the "brother" accuses Hoopdriver of being a detective. Delighted at having a game to play, Hoopdriver pursues the odd couple, eventually changing roles to that of a clumsy knight- errant once he and the woman (Jessie) realize the other chap is a genuine cad. Jessie's intention was to Be Her Own Woman, but her first ally turned out to be a manipulative fink. Eventually the gig is up for everyone, but Hoopdrive ends the tale most invigorated, having gone on a quest and discovered a friend who could put a little steel in his soul and allow him to dream of doing greater things with his life.

Although the story is nearly inconsequential, there's much charm. Wells' writing is often fun (one passage remarks that while Hoopdriver was in the throes of indecision, gravitation was hard at work and thus the man found himself on the ground with a bleeding shin, still wondering what to do), and sometimes beautiful, as when he's describing the landscape or the dreams of these two. Still, there were two reasons I picked this book up: bicycles and H.G. Wells -- and that, in the end, was the reason I finished it.  If nothing else this is literature from bicycling's first bloom of mass popularity.

Related:
Bicycles: The History,  David Herlihy

H.G. Wells and his wife Jane Wells

On Bikes

On Bicycles: 50 Ways the New Bike Culture Can Change Your Life
© 2011 ed. Amy Walker
384 pages

On Bicycles collects fifty cycling pieces, collecting in categories on why biking is awesome, how gear can make it better, how biking can improve cities, and how citizens can make a more bike-friendly community happen. But it's not just about the process of getting on a two-wheeled contraption and rolling away into the sunset, because the authors often look at bicycles in the context of community.

Bicycles make good neighbors; they're quiet, except for that pleasant whooshing sound; they don't fill the air with noxious byproducts (except for coffee breath), and they're accessible to everyone while making everywhere more accessible. Accessible to the handicapped? The aged? The pregnant? Yes, yes, and yes. Bikes can be modified. They're versatile machines that can adapted to haul cargo or even serve as a taxi. Their mechanical workings are far simpler than that of a car, and are all out there in the open to see. Anyone can learn to repair a bike, and the process of tinkering and succeeding is an empowering one. Bicycles can bring people together; several interesting pieces I saw here referenced bicycle collectives, shops where people volunteer labor to help others learn to repair their own bikes, and sustaining themselves by offering repairs for free. There are also bike parties, apparently.

Travel by bicycle has its perils, like dogs, but cyclists feel their surroundings as they pass through them. They can smell the air, watch small spectacles like clouds drifting across a pond, and genuinely feel the ground beneath them. There's a reason motorcyclists refer to cars as cages. Bicycles allow their riders to make snap decisions -- if they see something they want to investigate, that's it. They can. They don't have to spend time slowing down and toodling about for a parking space, by which point the initial spark of interest may have expired. Bicycles are also uber-efficient: they use much less space than cars, they can plug into multimodal transport networks more easily than cars, and they don't chew up pavement or guzzle gas. Oh, and they're fun.

If you cycle already, like myself, then this book is a bit of preaching to the choir -- but it covers so much ground there's bound to be something new to discover. For the person who is only curious about bicycles as not just a bit of transportation, but as a part of their life, this is virtually perfect reading.

Related:

• The Pedaling Revolution: How Cyclists are Changing American Cities, Jeff Mapes
• The Green Metropolis, David Owen

Related Vids: In the City of Bikes

Welcome to the entry in my Related Vids feature!

Jordan's book gave fine form to the history and culture of cycling in Amsterdam, but the above video shows off another side.  After a brief history of the bike vs. cars battle (a minute and a half),  this video reviews the ways in which cycling is built into Amsterdam's public infrastructure, set to happy guitar strumming.

In his Amsterdam history, Jordan commented on the utterly democratic nature of the bike-riding populace, which included every class and age bracket.  This video demonstrates that variety in just the first  minute and a half, including: someone carrying a carpet,  a mom with a baby behind her, a child riding alongside her mom, an elderly person, and several people talking on their cell phones. Forward and rear racks for carrying cargo are ubiquitous. 

If you're really intrigued, this is a slightly lengthier history of how Dutch cycling infrastructure developed, one which details how Dutch cities pushed back on automobile enroachment. The reasons listed: too many buildings and space given over to the cars, too many pedestrian deaths, and  the oil crisis, 

In the City of Bikes

In the City of Bikes: the Story of the Amsterdam Cyclist
© 2013 Pete Jordan
448 pages

"It is quite possible that all the bicycles in the world are not in Amsterdam, but you'll never be able to convince me."  American tourist, 1956

No sooner had Pete Jordan stepped foot outside the Amsterdam airport than did he nearly get run over by a rushing cyclist.  He met his near-miss with utter delight, for that was precisely why he was in Amsterdam. He'd come as a student to the Netherlands, to study urban design and the role of bikes in Dutch culture.   But the student would become something else, as In the City of Bikes documents his first decade as an Amsterdammer, a man whose career, family, and every joy were nurtured by the closely-knit buildings of this bike-and-canal city, where anything can be walked to but everyone rides bikes instead.  For a reader who sees in Amsterdam hope for humane urbanism,  Jordan's work is a delight through and through.

Why are the Dutch so crazy for bikes? It's not a question they'd ask themselves: in a city where over two-thirds of the people use bikes on a daily basis, the elegant little machines are nothing extraordinary. They don't require helmets, lycra, and a man-against-the-world attitude like cyclists in America bring to the saddle.  Cycles fill Amsterdam -- its streets, its sidewalks, its culture.  Early on, Jordan speculates on why the United States and the Netherlands developed so differently in terms of transportation;  he highlights the comparative availability of land, the scale of the American nation, and the abundance of domestic auto manufacturers as key reasons why the United States quickly embraced hordes of automobiles.   Cars only emerged as a serious rival to Dutch bikes in the 1960s, and just as they were provoking serious resistance  from student movements, the nations of OPEC thoughtfully banned oil exports to the Netherlands and bikes made an epic comeback. (This is, I submit, the greatest gift OPEC ever made to humankind.)

In the City of Bikes is essentially a personal approach to Amsterdam and its cycles that mixes in tales of Jordan's first decade of life in Amsterdam with a narrative history of the city and bicycling.  In the late 19th century, bicycling enjoyed intense support as a short-lived fad in places like the United States, but  the elegant machines had more staying power in a place like Europe with human-scale urbanism and close connections between worthwhile places to be. The Netherlands' flatness made it especially easy to cycle, so cyclists' numbers only grew and grew. The cyclists swarmed in such abundance that mayor after mayor despaired of their anarchism; even the Germans, after seizing the Netherlands, were frustrated.  Rule after rule the new overlords posted, and the Dutch ignored them. (Among the objects of Nazi irritation: Dutch cyclists not staying to the right, as well as holding hands and riding two to a bike.  Roads and bicycles are only for transportation, thank you, no joy allowed.) Only when the Nazis began methodically searching and seizing bicycles for use by their own troops did bicycles disappear --  broken down and squirreled away, or tossed into the canal just to spite the greycoats -- with the exception of those so badly maintained that even fleeing Nazi officers couldn't make use of them.

Cycling in Amsterdam is an utterly democratic mode of transportation: every class uses it regularly, and there's  no real relationship between the wealth of the cyclist and the value of the bike. Parliamentarians and bank executives pedaling to work in their $3000 suits often had the same beaten-up wheels as everyone else. This may owe to Amsterdam's intense amount of bike-thievery:   Jordan lost three bikes in his first two years there, and with theft that common there's no point in sinking money into a machine to begin it. (On that note, the black market in bikes is  amusingly perverted; when people have bikes stolen, they simply buy a stolen bike -- which is then stolen again. It's rather like a twisted kind of bike rental.)    Dutch cycling isn't limited to the young and intense: children grow up on bikes, and bike to school on their own accord. The elderly are mobile -- even pregnant women can cycle. Jordan's wife, for instance, transported herself to the hospital to have her baby, and when she left the place a mother, she returned home by bike.   During bicycling's first flare of popularity, Queen Wilhelmina was an ardent cyclist and remained so throughout her life, taking great pleasure in pedaling about incognito.

In the City of Bikes is not a guide to bicycling infrastructure. It's simply a story of humans living well --  Jordan, and the people of Amsterdam as a whole.  It is connected but free, rebellious but highly functional for human needs. If you like the city at its best, or like cycling, or simply have a care for human flourishing, this is a wonderful little book. I loved it before I bought it, I was thoroughly enblissed while reading it, and I already know it's one I will keep remembering with the thought: this is how life should be.

• Related:
• Pedaling Revolution: How Cyclists are Changing American Cities, Jeff Mapes. Amsterdam shows up in chapter one, naturally -- with Copenhagen right behind it. 
• Flickr search for "Amsterdam bicycles". Behold! 

From Chunk to Hunk

From Chunk to Hunk: Diary of a Fat Man
© 2003 Fred Anderson
242 pages

Fred Anderson had an epiphany while munching on snack cakes and watching TV; as he witnessed the amputation of a diabetic man's leg, he realized: this is my future.  Horrified at the thought of losing mobility, and frustrated by not being able to play with his daughter, Fred began watching what he ate and exercising daily. Two years later, he was down over a hundred and fifty pounds. From Chunk to Hunk is his record of that time, a journal doubling as a fitness coach to readers. Its focus is mental;  Anderson makes no dietary claims beyond Pollanesque observations that if a foodstuff needs a tv commercial, it's probably no good for you; instead, he preaches throughout on attitude adjustments, on how to form new habits, how to change attitudes towards food and exercise, and so on. In this two-year account, Anderson not only sheds a man's weight worth of fat, his health-focused lifestyle frees him from diabetic treatment. He doesn't forth a dietary or exercise regimen, maintaining that people are sensible enough to recognize "real" -- healthy -- food. The challenge is consistency, both in eating well and exercising. Anderson begins by treading water,  but shifts to daily intensive walks and adds in weight lifting, eventually alternating running days with weight-lifting and cycling days. Persistence is his motto: it doesn't matter if he makes the odd mistake, he exercises every single day, aside from a once-weekly rest day, and eats well the overwhelming majority of the time.  He isn't a puritan about coveting or abhorring one element or another;  he instead makes his ally Time, by simply making the same good choices every day.  Aristotle observed that our character is the sum of our actions; excellence is achieved by habit.   Anderson's candor, and the absence of a program being sold, make this a refreshing weight-loss account, one that doesn't pretend to nutritional wisdom. It's a bit on the preachy side -- despite not being religious, Anderson often quotes from the Bible and uses the same communicative tropes as some folksy preachers --  but this is forgivable, as is the sometimes too personal details he includes sporadically. I read this primarily to see how his journey paralleled my own -- both of us, in the twilight of our twenties, had a wake-up call and lost over a hundred pounds, with no magic except daily, vigorous exercise and moderate eating of natural foods.   I haven't embraced weight-lifting or running as enthusiastically as he have, but I very well may..

Into Thick Air

Into Thick Air
© 2003 Jim Mauser
388 pages

            Jim Mauser might be interested in the view from the Seven Summits, the highest points of each continent, were it not for the fact that they have accessibility issues. To Mauser, any place you can’t bike to isn’t worth bothering with. When Discovery offers to drop Mauser in the middle of nowhere and film him attempting to find his way back to civilization, Mauser has a better idea: why not finance and film his traveling to the seven lowest points on Earth – the seven anti-summits?   And so he embarks on a six-continent journey (Antarctica lowest point being covered by a very large pile of ice), through war zones and Passover, assailed by dogs, hurricanes, and crowds of children joyfully attempting to stone him,  to six of the lowest spots on Earth. Although his destinations are anticlimactic in the extreme, it’s the journeys getting there that makes this book. Mauser is rivaled only by Bill Bryson for the sheer entertainment value of his narrative, and is similar to him stylistically,  but Mauser records his world journeys with a botanist’s eye.  Those eyes are open to the full sweep of the glorious panorama of nature around them  -- the wildly divergent climates, the abundance of mesmerizing and often lethal fauna. Central to Mauser's story, like many travelers' tales, are the people he meets along the way, their kindnesses and eccentricities recorded along the way. Mauser isn't quite as vulnerable as world trekkers; his anti-summits are made in six completely different legs that take the better part of a decade to complete, and his starting locations for each leg seemed to be a week away from his destination, at best.  Even so, he's at considerable risk given his luck at pedaling into a place right before drama hits -- like a sudden case of the monsoon in South America -- and people around the world offer him friendly smiles and a stomach full of local cuisine. Into Thick Air is a fantastic cycle-touring book, treating the reader to a wide spectrum of human cultures and natural environments, with plenty of wry humor and scientific commentary on the way.

The Man Who Cycled the World

The Man Who Cycled the World
© 2011 Mark Beaumont
400 pages

Why did Mark Beaumont decide to try and break the world record for circumnavigating the world by bicycle? Well, it beat law school. In his early twenties, with his life's course unclear but full of energy and thirsty for adventure, Beaumont decided to tackle what few had before: cycling the world. His ambition was high, to break the record for doing it by at least two months, and the road ahead along. For nearly three hundred days, he pedaled -- starting in Paris, traveling to Istanbul, and then on to Calcutta via Iran and Pakistan, finally taking ships to Thailand, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States to cycle them in turn before returning to Europe at Portugal and ending in Paris again. Beaumont’s journey takes the reader with him through pleasant villages, congested cities, mesmerizing country scenes and desolate wildernesses beset by war. Though he largely escapes physical harm, (aside from being hit by a car in Texas, and mugged in Louisiana)  both he and his bike are put to the test by the 100-mile  days.  Through sickness and broken wheels, Beaumont had to struggle with not only  pedaling  upwards to 200 kilometers some days through hills and valleys, on roads that were sometimes scarcely more than dirt ruts, but cultural obstacles as well.  Although the English language is a world empire of its own,  communicating with the people whom he met and arranging food, lodging proved a constant struggle once outside of Europe.  Try finding a bike shop in the middle of a warzone, or worse -- in the United States.

Beaumont didn't do this alone;  shielded in part by the British embassy (presumably because of the BBC's interest in filming him) and guided by his dear mother in Scotland, he was also aided by the many strangers he met along the way.  Although the world is not filled with saints, it is peppered with them, and Beaumont was given a helping hand,  and a meal and a bed in a private home more often than he was scowled at or attacked. A global journey such as his offers the reader plenty of scope for adventure, peril, and a variety of landscapes, and Beaumont's account makes the most of these while minimizing  those portions of the journey which were more tedious.  This is one of the better cycling memoirs I've read, and I'm happy to learn that Beaumont has another. In his epilogue, he mentioned that after this journey he decided to climb the highest peak in North America, Mt. McKinley in Alaska,  then cycle down the coasts of North, Central, and South America to climb the highest peak there, Mt. Aconcagua.  He has now cycled in every continent save Africa and Antartica, and I intend on reading his The Man who Cycled the Americas as soon as it is available in US markets. (Or, I may just buy one from the UK. It certainly wouldn't be the first book of mine which has arrived bearing the marks of the Royal airmail.)

This week at the library: Jesus, bikes, and Greeks

In recent weeks I've finished up an unplanned series of readings on first-century Judeo-Christianity.  Shortly after checking out The Origin of Satan for some historical research, two seperate people happened to reccommend Misquoting Jesus and Zealot at the same time, meaning my head is just swimming with facts on the destruction of the temple. Comments for Zealot will follow tonight.

Outside of those, I read Bruce Thorton's Greek Ways, which defends the primacy of Greek contributions to western civilization. His basis is that while many cultures had similar ideas to the Greeks -- a semblance of science, the beginnings of democracy, and so on -- none of them developed as fully or magnificiently as they did in Greece. Further, while the Greeks were seriously flawed, their limitations were those of the human race, while their triumphs were culture-specific. He draws extensively on Greek poetry and prose to put their ideas and behaviors into historical context, and to argue that ideals of western civilization, like political liberty and religious skepticism, were first expressed in their fullest form in Greek minds.  Being hopelessly biased toward the Greeks,  I don't trust myself to do a proper review, but I was impressed by his research.

Additionally, I read through Just the Two of Us, a travel memoir by Melissa Norton, who with her husband  cycled across North America, from the Pacific to the Atlantic. I enjoyed it well enough, but it wasn't a standout for me, at least not when compared to Hey, Mom, Can I Ride My Bike Across America?  I'd been told that Just the Two of Us contained a lot of information on bike mechanics, but my source must have been thinking of another book altogether;  this is a travel diary, and rather complete at that, with the inclusion of mileage logs. (David Lamb's Over the Hills was bike-info heavy, because it had to be; aside from a dog chasing him, nothing happened on his journey. Compare that to John Siegel-Boettner's trip with middle-schoolers, where they were chased not by dogs, but by tornados!

Yesterday I finished Bill Bryson's The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, a memoir of a baby-boomer childhood. I'd say it's one of Bryson's funniest pieces, but they run together in one long string of belly laughs. More comments on it may follow later.

This week I am attempting to finish, or at least make some progress in, Lewis Mumford's The City in History. After that I have The Consumers' Republic and The Last Humans, and I'm intending on reading a bit more fiction as the year is winding down. I'll probably be resuming Sharpe's series; I believe I left the good rifleman perched at the edge of the Pyrenees, poised to invade France and send Napoleon packing.

Bicycle: the History

Bicycle: The History
© 2006 David Herlihy
480 pages

Where did the bicycle come from? Bicycle: the History tells the story in exacting detail, beginning in the 19th century. An age of progress  and scientific triumph, wherein everyday life was constantly being revolutionized by inventions, it set many people to work finding a way to improve personal transportation. Surely we could do better than moving our feet back and forth -- so primitive! Why not do that on a set of wheels, instead? The first bike-like things were conceived as mere aides to running, driven by their riders striking the ground with their feet.  It took decades before pedals, brakes, comfortable seats, and the like were added to those first frames to make what we could recognize as a bike. In the intervening half-century, inventors pursued other avenues, coming up with bizarrely huge machines driven forward by people turning cranks with their hands, or the amusing high-wheeled bicycles, which required a ladder and the 19th century equivalent of an oxygen mask to cope with the thinner air.  Most of the improvements made to these early bikes, or velocipedes, created faddish vehicles that became national obsessions that lasted for a year or so before suddenly fading away into oblivion. The high-wheels had more staying power, but eventually they were humbled by simple improvements made to the original idea -- and lo, the  Safety Bicycle.  Alas for it, it had scarcely come onto the scene before the motorized, horseless carriage also came sputtering and coughing onto the road, and the 20th century belonged more to the automobile than the humble bicycle. This was especially true in the United States, but not quite as much in Europe or in China, where space and poverty (respectively) limited motoring's expansion.  Bicycle is  most thorough, at least in covering the 19th century: at times it offers a year by year account of the velociopeding fads, at times verging on plodding when it fixates on patent battles. Though sometimes technical, Bicycle also covers the human aspect in full, demonstrating how bicycle usage changed patterns of dress and social mores, and began working the general culture. The text is also replete with scores of historical photographs, many gorgeous, which liven up any dry spots. Though it could have used more information on the 20th century, on the whole this is an impressively thorough history.

Related:
Pedaling Revolution: How Cyclists are Changing American Cities, Jeff Mapes

This Week at the Library: Star Wars, bikes, and evil farms

Fool's Bargain, Timothy Zahn
Just Ride, Grant Peterson
Against the Grain, Richard Manning

This week my  local library began officially offering electronic books via membership in a regional e-book collective.  Although I much prefer real books (see my printed-book snobbery? "real books", I said), I've been checking titles out and reading them on my computer to practice with the software...since I'll soon be explaining to people how to use it.  My first read was a Star Wars novella by Timothy Zahn called Fool's Bargain. Set sometime after the destruction of the empire and starring a squad of stormtroopers who are loyal to "The Empire of the Hand", it follows them as they attempt to capture a warlord in a secret underground hideout. The tension comes from their having to recruit allies on the ground...possibly treacherous ones. It's more a short story than anything else, but I enjoyed it.

My second e-read through this system is one of the rare nonfiction titles available through our consortium, and it's called Just Ride.  As you might guess from the cover, its subject is bicycling. The author is a cycling advocate, and believes that the United States bicycling culture has for too long been dominated by the racing scene, which sees bikes as Serious Business, demanding special pedals, special shoes with clips for the special pedals, special clothes, hi-tech gadgets, and hours upon hours of grueling practice. Nonsense! Phooey! Quatsch! Baloney! says he. Bikes are fun. Bikes take you places. Explore that more.  After introductions in which he grumbles about this or that aspect of race culture,  most of the book consists of simple advice on how to get the most out of cycling. Wear street clothes;  ride anytime you like, just for fun, no matter how little a distance;  rig your bike with practical accessories, like baskets; don't try to turn a bicycle into a weight-loss machine. He also provides day-to-day maintenance tips along with actual cycling advice, as with the chapter on how to drift in turning. Just Ride was a fun read, and if you're on facebook there is a "Slow Bicycle" group dedicated to ideas like the author's.

In terms of 'real' reading, May was a fairly fat month. I'm not sure why, but that was also true last year: after a quiet April, May exploded.  It helped that a lot of the reads were on the shorter side, with some energetic authors, especially Jim Kunstler and Joel Salatin. I'm apparently doing a series on food at the moment; something about the explosion of color in the produce isle in late spring brings out my inner foodie. I've just finished Against the Grain: How Agriculture Hijacked Civilization, which isn't quite what I was expecting. The author's primary contention is that agriculture isn't about producing food, it's about the accumulation of wealth. Considering the health disparities between hunter-gatherers, who had a broad diet, and agriculturalists who subsisted on  grains (leading to malnutrition, stunted growth, and early death), early agriculture didn't feed people fully so much as it  kept workers alive so they could continue working to enrich the plantation owners. Also, monocultures and processed foods suck. These were the author's chief contentions, but they weren't developed in any thorough, systematic way; the book was more a collection of musings than an argument.  A recurring theme was that of sensualism; in the author's view, agriculture keeps us from experiencing life fully, both because hunting enlivens the senses in a way that farming and buying food don't, and because farming is a dull, monotonous, body-killing lifestyle that only succeeded through imperialism, both military and ecological. 

My next read in that neighborhood may be Diet for a Hot Planet, but after the last couple of months I'm in the mood for something light, fun, and comforting, so I think I'll try a Wendell Berry novel. Also, seeing as the Fourth of July is less than a month away, I'm beginning to think of what my  celebratory reading will be. I'm currently considering a biography of George Washington by Joseph Ellis, whose work I like, and a biography of Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow, which was reccommended to me as an antidote to all of the anti-Hamiltonian views I was exposed to in my John Adams obsession last year.

In the post this week I received three books: Glimpses of World History, by Jawaharlal Nehru, the first president of India;  The Story of my Experiments with Truth, by Mohandas Gandhi, and An Edible History of Humanity by Tom Standage. Actually, that may be my light-and-fun read.  A confession:  while most of my books come from libraries or used stores online, whenever I drive to the "big city" of Montgomery, I stop in at a Books-A-Million to look at the magazines.  Somehow in the bible belt they manage to sell magazines as scurrilous as Free Inquiry, and even offer magazines for obscure hobbies like model train collecting. (Not that I've bought one, I just see it when I'm getting my own copies of Trains and Classic Trains and...well, you get the picture.)   Invariably I am harassed by the clerk who wants me to buy one of those membership cards, in which you pay $20 and then get discounts on books and shipping. Well, the clerk at the BAM! I tend to go to the most is very persuasive, and a couple of months ago I finally broke down and bought one of the things. (I was in a good mood: I'd been to the zoo and to a most excellent play, a performance of "Around the World in 80 Days").  Early this week I decided to go to the BAM website to see there were any opportunities for recouping my $20 investment, and so help me if they weren't offering a copy of a book on my to-read-eventually list (Edible History) in the online bargain bin, for such a low price that I'd pay more to borrow it through interlibrary loan.  Assuming I saved something like $3 for shipping (I would have never gone for express were it not "Free"), I figure the card's real cost is now $17. I suppose if I bought more, I could recoup more of that, but that's exactly what they want me to do, so I'm just going to see if I can earn that $17 back on bargain books that I would have paid $3 for interlibrary loan shipping anyway.

Hey Mom, Can I Ride My Bike Across America?

Hey Mom, Can I Ride My Bike Across America? Five Kids Meet their Country
© 1990 John Siegel Boettner
with excerpts from the journals of Heather Deutsch, Joy Fulton, Jimmy West, Carl Fagerlin, and Ethan Turpin.
439 pages

The United States isn't a nation that makes touring it by bike easy: those who wish to do it must tackle mountain ranges,  broad deserts, a cornucopia of potential natural disasters -- and that's not even including American drivers. Imagine trying to do it while simultaneously watching over five teenagers --  five kids, really, a group of three boys and two girls, all eleven between eleven and thirteen years old. That's what John Siegel Boettner, a middle-school teacher in California, did in the year of 1986. Beginning at the start of summer break, he and his wife toured with the kids from Washington, D.C. across the continent to Oregon, then down California to their home, a journey of nearly five thousand miles -- braving tornadoes, heat waves, snowstorms, and a string of mechanical problems, all in an effort to teach the kids about their country.

John Siegel Boettner isn't your usual teacher: the fact that's he willing to take care of five of his kids for four months across the nation and through a variety of disasters might already indicate that.  An avid cyclist, as soon as he began teaching he organized a bicycle club and began taking his kids on extended trips called "Educational Safaris": in one, he and his wards biked through the northeast,  exploring the sites of the American Revolution. Not only did the bike trips give the kids an opportunity to learn about themselves, of what they could achieve through their effort alone, but it made their history, their culture, come more alive...and such was their teacher's intention here, as after Mississippi they follow the Oregon Trail to the west coast.  By day, John is their leader, captain, mechanic, and coach, helping them to organize and keep moving, and calling the shots when things get hairy...as they did, often.  Unlike David Lamb's Over the Hills,  Hey Mom is peppered with near-disasters, usually near the mountains. By night, he's a teacher, reading to them from the journals of an Oregon Trail pioneer whose path they follow and whose experiences are an eerie mirror of their own.  The trip extends a month past summer vacation, but John feels no guilt about keeping the kids about of school. In his view, the experiences they are gaining on the road are worth far more than a month of memorization and regurgitation. This is the trip of a lifetime, the intimate details of which John accounts in the book, and when it was finished I felt sad, as though I'd been part of the experience and it was now over.

Before leaving on the trip, John read to his kids from Peter Jenkins' A Walk Across America;  Jenkins, too, transversed the nation in an effort to learn about it, to spend time with its people. Like Jenkins before them, John, his wife, and the kids gain much from the kindness of strangers...and strangers across the continent are very kind indeed to a band of kids doing what most think impossible even for adults, crossing a land of three thousand miles by bicycle.   Although this is the story of a journey, it's more about the people -- both the kids involved, like young Ethan who could barely ride a bike when the tale began, and the people who they meet, like the Amish folk in Tennessee.  I find accounts of people walking or cycling the entire country to be fascinating by themselves, but Hey Mom is extraordinary for featuring kids, whose energy, idealism, and joy and make a work to revel in reading.

Very much recommended. 

Related:

• The author giving a TEDx talk called "The Joy of Looking", in which he shares how one of his cycling students taught him the lesson of The Dead Poets' Society: gather rosebuds while ye may.. It's beautiful.
• A Walk Across America, Peter Jenkins

Pedaling Revolution

Pedaling Revolution: How Cyclists are Changing American Cities
© 2009 Jeff Mapes
288 pages

That's some serious wind resistance there, buddy.

Governments across the world today are beset by problems common to all: rising fuel prices and obesity rates, the ever-present spectre of climate change, and the transportation needs of increasingly urbanized (or re-urbanizing) populations. Enter the humble bicycle: accessible to virtually everyone, regardless of age, sex, or income level; clean, quiet, and an excellent source of exercise. For too long in the United States, bicycling has been the province of a few intense racers and tourers who pride themselves on how miserable a trek they can endure. The end of the cheap oil era, however, has prompted cities to reexamine the bicycle as a means of transportation for the many, despite the car-centric nature of the American city.

Curbing car domination is not a futile hope: in the 1970s,  stirred by soaring oil prices, the Netherlands moved to discourage car use and promote cycling. The city of Amsterdam became a pioneer in modern cycling infrastructure; only Copenhagan can rival it. Both cities boast that nearly half of all trips within their cores happen via a cycle. Fittingly, then, Mapes begins with Amsterdam's story -- but the United States has its own homegrown success in Davis, California, a university town whose early growth was managed by a cycling advocate.  But Davis had it easy:  New York City and Portland, Oregon's success in creating room for cyclists in an already established urban area filled with cars is arguably more impressive.

Mapes' chapters on these cities not only demonstrate their success, but explore how they did it.  There's no authoritative source for how best to integrate bike traffic into transportation infrastructure. Approaches range from the simple (simply painting bike lanes onto existing roads) to the more involved (separate bike paths and even 'bike boulevards') -- and there are some who deny the need for bicycle infrastructure at all, harrumphing that cyclists should just learn to ride safely with auto traffic.  But more than just the built environment have to change to encourage cycling: traffic laws, like right-turn-on-red permits that allow motorists to take over pedestrian and cyclist right-of-ways, must be addressed. The book ends with a section on cycling safety, health benefits, and the important role bikes can play in raising children, and thus in creating a broader, sustainable bike culture.

Pedaling Revolution has great appeal to both cyclists and citizens concerned about the state of American cities, for whom it should prove most encouraging. The argue for cycling more is better made in The Green Metropolis, the cover of which is of a city in bodily form on a bike, but Mapes' account gives the already-converted great reason for hope, and could easily intrigue the curious to becoming part of a bicycling renaissance.

Taken from an April edition of The Selma Morning Times, 1900.

Related:

• Copenhaganize, a blog covering cities around the world as they move toward being more bike friendly, like Amsterdam Copenhagen.
• The Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability, David Owen
• Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time, Jeff Speck
• The Sprocket and Critical Transit, two podcasts hosted by urban cyclists....based in Portland, naturally. The Sprocket's tagline is 'Simplifying the Good Life'; I especially enjoy their interviews with carfree parents.

Shift

Shift
© 2008 Jennifer Bradbury
245 pages

Chris and his best friend Win decided to cycle across the United States in the summer between high school and their freshman year of college -- but only Chris came back, and now his first month at university is being made difficult by an intrusive FBI agent and the threats of Win's powerful father. In Shift, Chris tells the story of his adventure across America...the story that changed his and Win's lives, and one which is a face-paced mystery for readers.

Jennifer Bradbury seamlessly weaves together the present-day story in which Chris adjusts to freshman life coming off his cycling journey with the story of said journey, with the questions of the agent setting the stage for Chris's recollections. When I first picked the book up,  I was wary that this might be a murder mystery of some kind, but happily that's not the case.  After the first third of the book, the reader will probably have realized what happened to Win, and will thus be a few steps ahead of the FBI agent, who is operating on his own, and without official sanction from the Bureau. Such is the power that Win's father holds over people. What matters is how what happened came to happen: Shift is less a journey across the United States, and more the journey of two young men to find themselves...by way of getting lost.

Although I checked the book out because it was the only novel in the library concerning bicycles, the humor and character development quickly captivated me. It's targeted toward high schoolers.

Bicycle Diaries

Bicycle Diaries
© 2009 David Byrne
297 pages

Though I've never heard of the musician and visual artist David Bryne before, his recollections of time spent in some of the world's greatest cities had my attention from the start -- for he experienced them on the saddle of a bike, bringing a fold-up bicycle with him as part of his luggage. The bicycle allows him to explore cities more intimately than from a car, but more quickly than on foot -- and while he cycles through Berlin, Istanbul, London, Buenos Aires, he ponders on subjects which they inspire.

Every city inspires musing on different matters. He begins with a fantastic critique of American cities that is right out of The Geography of Nowhere: I posted a selection here. In Buenos Aires, he writes about the local music scene: in Berlin, a visit to the Stasi museum prompts an essay about justification and human nature. Thoughts on biking bookend the text; his final section on New York focuses mainly on its attempts to become a more bike-friendly city, and the epilogue addresses the bicycle's potentially expanding role in the future as energy crises force us to make more intelligent decisions about where we live and how we get around. These and the opening section on American cities made the book for me.

Cities featured are Berlin, Istanbul, Buenos Aires, Manila, Sydney, London, San Francisco, and New York.

Over the Hills

Over the Hills: A Midlife Escape Across America by Bicycle
© 1996 David Lamb
254 pages

Despite a life of front-line journalism in Vietnam and Rwanda, LA Times journalist David Lamb feels as though his lifestyle has become positively sedentary as he approaches middle age. In an attempt to prove to himself that he's capable of great deeds, he decides to travel across the country -- on a touring bike. After cursory preparation, Lamb hits the road with his saddlebags and makes his way across the hills and valleys of the Eastern coast, through the southwestern deserts, and over the Rockies straight to Santa Monica's pier. Since pedestrians and cyclists are barred from the interstates,  Lamb keeps to the backroads, including the venerable Route 66, stopping to chat up local townsfolk on deserted city streets and pedaling for his life to escape from packs of aggressive dogs in farm country.

The trip itself is absent of drama, aside from the dog chases: there are no accidents, no close calls, no miserable slogs through blinding storms. Lamb manages to avoid rain the entire time, the only inclement weather being the 'headwinds' of the plains which slow him down considerably.  His travel log consists of descriptions of the passing landscape, particularly the small towns he beds in, his dealings with the people he meets, and ruminations about life on the road. He adds to this a history of the bicycle, and its role in shaping the United States' social and transportation history.

I enjoy stories about people who hit the open road and go where it takes them, exploring and venturing into the unknown, and Over the Hills was no exception. While Lamb doesn't use his isolation on the road to delve into philosophy and the meaning of life (as did Peter Jenkins in A Walk Across America), I enjoyed his encounters with small-town America all the same, though aside from the 'ordinary kindnesses' the strangers offered there was little good news to be had. Most towns, Lamb wrote, had picked up and moved to interstate exit ramps,  leaving the old communities to rot in abandonment.  More cheery than this was the fascinating history of the bicycle in American culture, which Lamb concludes by detailing how modern cities are attempting to encourage bicycle activity.  Parts of the book are dated ($15-and $20 motel rooms?!), but  it's a fun ride read.

Related:

• A Walk Across America, Peter Jenkins
• A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryon