RaveThe Atlantic... takes readers time-traveling and globe-trotting to build up an alternate narrative about a simple machine that becomes harder to categorize the more you learn about it ... Rosen covers this early history because he has to, but immediately starts mining it for nuance ... Even when they’re a bit of a stretch, these historical and global parallels, which Rosen draws throughout the book, disentangle bicycles from the ownership of any one time or type of person ... In the passages where he describes what it actually feels like to ride, he makes it sound irresistible ... His enthusiasm does occasionally overwhelm. Fascinating tidbits organized by loose themes, abrupt topical switches within sections, and chapters on trick cycling, exercise bikes, and bikes as sex objects make the book comprehensive but also unfocused. Still, the meandering structure often feels like a leisurely ride, full of spontaneous detours into unexpected delight ... But what makes the book essential is its rigorous reporting. Rosen holds his responsibility as a journalist higher than his love for his subject, sharing unflattering and sometimes bleak truths about bicycles that rust their shining image ... Rosen doesn’t wrestle with these stories so much as list them in thorny intertwinings, challenging readers to put aside any assumptions they might have had about bikes before picking up the book ... In showing that bikes have always been complicated—accessories to some and essential to others, means of recreation and of labor, signifiers of both wealth and poverty—Rosen also shows that they are universal, inviting even the most skeptical readers along with his humility and humor. Bicycles don’t belong to hipsters in Brooklyn or to parents in Copenhagen, and riding one doesn’t have to signify anything about the rider. You needn’t give your bike a second thought if you don’t want to. In all of their complexity, and maybe because of it, bicycles have always been, and will always be, for everyone.
Megan K. Stack
PanThe BafflerThe experience of hiring domestic workers for the first time while living abroad radicalizes [Stack], although she stops short of quite connecting all the dots ... Right up to the last page, Stack keeps doing this: almost landing on the Marxist polemic she swears she’s not writing. She never gets there because her book never mentions—or, you could say, it erases—decades of socialist feminist thought that preceded it. For such a worldly woman, and a journalist, it’s almost unbelievable that she never discovered this rich history. Or maybe she left it out on purpose, to lure in other comfortable white women who can’t quite put their finger on why they feel so bad about having a nanny but might balk at a socialist framing.
John Darnielle
MixedThe Village VoiceThe Iowa Darnielle brings us to is a vast, unchanging place that can be both comforting and suffocating. His prose, honed over decades of songwriting for the Mountain Goats, is perfectly suited to this kind of story. In song, he distills entire lives into evocative three-minute scenes of caustic wit and painful tenderness. His fiction writing drops water onto that brittle sponge, expanding his signature voice in a way that's relaxed and infinitely readable ... The longer he teases out the mystery this way, meandering through these hypotheticals and the insignificant details of characters' memories, the more the creepy footage feels like a bait-and-switch, imported from a different, tighter book to make this one more immediately jarring. As the final section rushes abruptly toward, and then through, an explanation, the careful simplicity of the preceding chapters shatters, without much impact ... What Darnielle delivers instead is an unsettling, almost terrifying truth: that we can never fully understand the people around us, and by the time we realize they need saving, it may already be too late.
