My favorite bike book: THE MAN WHO LOVED BICYCLES, Daniel Behrman, Harpe r's Magazine Press, 1973. Not a manual, but a meditation, and a memoir.
I stumbled into a hardbound copy of this a few years ago, and it has sta yed with me (in all senses). I really got something--inspiration even in desolation--out of this book. I'm not the only one with him on my mind. Googling, I found this recent blog entry from someone named Ben McKenzie, which I assume is in the pub lic domain: The Annual Re-Reading of "The Man Who Loved Bicycles: The Memoirs of an Autophobe"Sun, 2007-10-07 23:04Last week or so, I lamented that I couldn 't remember the last book that I had read. Browsing the shelf, my eyes f ell upon my hardbound copy of The Man Who Loved Bicycles, a book written in 1973 by Daniel Behrman.
I had forgotten how painful and beautiful the book can be. I have never managed to finish it, because reading it online tends to, after awhile, prove to be too much of a strain.
For those of you who don't want to trudge through a year of posts or so, below is a recap of this book.
Daniel Behrman was a writer for UNESCO from 1950 to 1972. the UNESCO sit e doesn't have any of his writings, but if you search Amazon for him, yo u'll find some listings of his published works. The Man Who Loved Bicycl es, however, is not a scientific piece. In his own words: "I am an old h and at science writing, I know how to check a fact to a frazzle and weas el my words to the satisfaction of the most worrisome source. But not th is time, for once let the burden of proof be on the other side."
It's both saddening, uplifiting, enjoyable, and overwhelming all at once . He managed to be before his time by suggesting that obesity may be lin ked to driving. He writes about gentrification in both Paris and New Yor k, about the then-dying past (which, although I've never been to New Yor k and Paris, I can only assume died out in the intervening years). He wr ites about the absurdity of advertising from Madison Avenue.
The most interesting thing that I've found is that apparently, there was this assumption in Britain that smog was impossible there, since it rec eived less sunlight than Los Angeles (the capital of smog at the time), a long standing myth that was starting to unravel around the time the bo ok had been written.
I'll shut up now. The Man Who Loved Bicycles is available online for you
r reading pleasure. The book is damn hard to find, and I'm not likely to
loan out my hard bound copy any time soon. --end of quote. Thanks Ben,
and I hope you don't mind my lifting of your blog entry.
Is it possible that anyone on this list actually met Daniel Behrman? He
is no longer with us, I regret to say.
Tom Ward, New York, NY / USA