Bicycle History

Bicycle/Race paints an unforgettable picture of Los Angeles—and the United States—from the perspective of two wheels. This is a book of borderlands and intersections, a cautionary tale about the dangers of putting infrastructure before culture, and a coming-of-age story about power and identity.

Did you know that in the late nineteenth century, the United States military used bikes to travel from one place to another? They were a new invention and a quicker way to travel than walking. Lieutenant James Moss and twenty soldiers tested the durability of bikes by traveling through six states from the West to the Midwest to prove its usability in the military.

The Bicycle Book takes you on two intertwining paths. One is the author’s fond oftentimes funny tale of being a newbie paperboy at the tender age of 12. Adventures in customer relations become lifetime lessons thanks to Steve’s quirky, brilliantly pedagogical dad, a top advertising executive given to Socratic Q&A dialoguing and mealtime family seminars.

Dennis Wilson (Sticks) takes you on a gripping tale of life in the Projects. What began as innocent kids in a bicycle gang eventually became something much more. But family is not always what it seems in this raw, entertaining mystery. The body of a local drug dealer is discovered, Detective Faye-Lynn Johnson assigned the case, and everyone becomes a suspect, including her boyfriend. Conflicting facts soon emerge as she grapples with this baffling mystery.

The Bicycle Shop is a front for running a safe house in Kansas. The visitors coming and going are humans from other worlds and visit this world to learn and move forward. The “ranch” is run by a colorful older woman, and the program manager is the owner of the bicycle shop.

A History of the Transportation Revolution covers the history of the evolution of major modes of human transportation. The book provides interesting events in the development of walking, roads, airships, bicycles, aviation, kites, railroads, jet engines and rockets. Additional sections cover the history of canals, boats, ships and more.

When more than 100 men or women go racing down a road, inches away from each other, in all weather, over all kinds of roads, the opportunity for a brilliant win or a terrible accident is always there. For more than a century, bicycle racers have sought glory, but have often found only misery. There can be only one winner, and even that triumph can be mixed with terrible loss. Fausto Coppi, coached by a blind man, set the World Hour Record in Milan during the war while the city was being shattered by bombs.

'The Green Bicycle Mystery' is Jepson's account of a true unsolved murder case. Bella Wright was found lying dead beside her bicycle on a lonely country lane in Leicestershire. She had been shot through the head. The last person seen in her company was a man on a green bicycle. When months later a green bicycle is dredged from a canal, the police are hot on the track of the mystery man.