PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksThe book is certainly informative as a sociological study and discourse on Parisian life ... However, the book feels most compelling when it puts us on the streets themselves and lets us mingle with the interesting figures who populate Kuper’s story ... In his more personal narratives, Kuper comes across as thoughtful and candid, a man aware of his own flaws and willing to recount his embarrassing missteps.
Jody Rosen
PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of Books... shifts from tales of enchantment and wild legends to more factual accounts and events grounded in history. The approach is akin to how Rosen, a longtime cyclist himself, describes the act of traveling on two wheels: an experience like \'gliding somewhere between terra firma and the huge horizonless sky.\' That is a beautiful expression of the book’s ambition, but it also covers a lot of territory. In certain chapters, I did find myself wondering if the book’s appeal would be limited to \'bicycle obsessives,\' as Rosen calls them, or if his work would charm general audiences in the way that John McPhee, for example, inspires laypeople to read about remote landscapes and geologic history ... At its best, Two Wheels Good serves up wonderful surprises and a cast of whimsical characters ... The book’s far-flung topics are often insightful and rewarding, though lengthy excursions can sometimes dampen the momentum and turn the book into something of a catchall. Extended passages on bicycle innovation, bicycle porn, bicycle traffic in Bangladesh, and other various nuts and bolts — while certainly informative — steal energy from Rosen’s livelier anecdotes and may invite some skimming ... The author’s own relationship to cycling provides a nice personal touch, yet the chapter’s multiple sections and sidebars make it feel less like a narrative than an assembly of parts ... Rosen’s book supplies us with important background while preserving a sense of romanticism and intrigue. The author, to his credit, does not idealize his subject ... He successfully portrays the bicycle as a machine of great consequence — both a vital extension of the human body and an enduring object of our imagination.
A.D. Jameson
MixedThe Washington PostA self-described geek, Jameson aligns himself with enlightened critics who view the 1970s as a crucial turning point in American cinema ... However ... Star Wars, he contends, is actually a stepbrother of the realist genre ... On this front, Jameson is persuasive ... He owns up to a childhood of being picked on and the sanctuary he found in the \'Geek Dorm\' at college. His personal story adds a lighter touch to the book’s wonkiness, and it’s hard not to share his enthusiasm as he describes how his favorite characters colonized a world that once ridiculed them. Unfortunately, when Jameson turns to the evolution of comic-book superheroes...the book begins to stall—just as it does later when it details the numerous reference guides, games and other auxiliaries through which fantasy worlds grow ever-deeper roots. With so much fetishizing, Jameson’s work soon embodies the very dilemma he raises about a nerdy culture gone mainstream: how to appeal to both \'entrenched\' fans and non-geeks alike?\
