Tips & Reviews

Ballad of the Whiskey Robber: A True Story of Bank Heists, Ice Hockey, Transylvanian Pelt Smuggling, Moonlighting Detectives, and Broken Hearts By Julian Rubinstein You won’t believe it’s true. With a title like that, who wouldn’t be skeptical?  Open the… Read full article

Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnick   New York Times Notable Book of 2000 & New York Public Library Selection as one of the 25 Memorable Books of 2000.   Those who wish to be travelers, not simply tourists,… Read full article

When the history of American bicycle touring is written it will surely include the story of Frank A. Elwell of Portland, Maine who was the nation’s first bicycle tour organizer. He began “high-wheel” tours in New England and Quebec in… Read full article

Paris, by Émile Zola (1898) Émile Zola was one of France’s most astute social critics at the end of the nineteenth century.  A prolific writer, he embarked on a 20-volume series of novels in the 1870s about corruption in French… Read full article

Love and War in the Apennines by Eric Newby There is no scarcity of personal memoirs of World War II. Yet Eric Newby’s narrative of war, escape, love, and peasant farmers in Italy’s Apennine mountains in 1944 has lasted thirty… Read full article

Read Any Good Books Lately? We usually try to make sure our book reviews have at least something to do with cycling, or hiking, or the places we visit and their history. But that’s not all we read! At a… Read full article

Provence by Lawrence Durrell Lawrence Durrell belongs to a group of travel writers who go back to the British expatriates of the early and mid-20th century. He lived most of his life in the Mediterranean region and has left a… Read full article

Heft on Wheels: A Field Guide to Doing a 180 by Mike Magnuson Heft on Wheels makes no secret of its subject matter. On the front, we have a photo of author Mike Magnuson, naked, obese and miserable riding his… Read full article

Landscapes of Cycling by Graham Watson If you go to see The Race in person, you will see Graham Watson (also known as “Photo 1”) on the race course – he is the man on the back of a motor… Read full article

Songbirds, Truffles, and Wolves (An American Naturalist in Italy) by Gary Paul Nabhan Colin Fletcher, one of the great walkers of the 20th century (The Man Who Walked Through Time and The Complete Walker) advised his readers to find something… Read full article

Giving Good Weight: Unmasking Food Writer John McPhee My all time favorite food essayist is John McPhee. This may come as a surprise, mainly because McPhee writes about so many things (his interests are even more eclectic than mine, it… Read full article