Angel Garcia wrote: "The Sunday (tomorrow) New York Times' Book Review section has a glowing one page review of this book published by Yale University Press, 470 pages."
Here's the article:
http://www.nytimes.com/
It's notable, in light of e-Richie's interest in New Yorker bicycle art, that the author of the review, Edward Koren, is a longtime artist for The New Yorker and, in his own words, an "addicted cyclist".
Snipped from the review:
"As an addicted cyclist, I must come clean about a certain ambivalence concerning David V. Herlihy's first book. While 'Bicycle' is immensely absorbing, I was often compelled to put it aside. It was as if the author himself were imploring me to take a break and come outside and play. A passage cited from an editorial in Brooklyn Life in 1895, written during the height of the cycling boom, nicely conveys the fealty to our mechanical mounts that I and many others have today: 'A ride in its saddle is the perfection of motion and the acme of gentle exercise. Once there, a man or woman wants to be there most of their time. The desire grows. And this is the reason why bicycling is not a fad, but something that is going to last so long as men and women have legs.'"
"Herlihy's prodigious research is always entertaining, as are the period illustrations that copiously grace the volume. There are bicycle tales, like an account from Bicycling World in 1908 about Harvard's septuagenarian president, Charles W. Eliot, who cycled the several miles between his home and his office: 'Every clear morning' Eliot 'jumps on his bicycle . . . like a boy in his teens.'"
Mordecai Silver
NYC