Tips & Reviews

My Life on Two Wheels My Life on Two Wheels By Clifford L. Graves (Manivelle Press, La Jolla, CA; 1985) The history of Americans touring Europe by bicycle is yet to be written. When it is, it will likely begin… Read full article

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

cellspacing=”0″ cellpadding=”0″ width=”100%” summary=”” border=”0″> Spoke Songs/Metal Cowboy   Spokesongs (Bicycle Adventures on Three Continents) by Willie Weir     Metal Cowboy (Tales from the Road Less Pedaled) by Joe Kurmaskie   Bicycling is very much a solitary sport: first,… Read full article

The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century by Thomas L. Friedman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005)   When I began graduate school in geography at the University of Oregon in the early 1970s some of the… 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

The Words of Bernfrieda, A Chronicle of Hauteville by Gabriella Brooke NOTE: For those of you traveling with us to Southern Italy, or simply interested in finding out more about this region, we’ve included an annotated reading list at the… Read full article

A Passion for Piedmont: Italy’s Most Glorious Regional Table by Matt Kramer (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1997) With the winter Olympics coming up in February 2006 in Italy’s Piedmont region we thought we might suggest some reading… Read full article

House of Niccoló by Dorothy Dunnet I have a friend who was so taken with Dorothy Dunnett’s eight volume series based on the travels of a 15th century Flanders businessman and adventurer that she planned a trip around his base… Read full article

Peter Pezzelli, Home to Italy (New York: Kensington Books, 2004) Peter Pezzelli’s first novel is a delightful tale of loss and grieving, of personal tragedy and of rebirth. A simple, predictable story becomes more complex as it develops. It is… 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

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

Food and Culture in Europe – Part II The Culture of the Fork – A brief history of food in Europe by Giovanni Rebora (Translated by Albert Sonnenfeld; Columbia University Press, 1998) Italian Cuisine: A Cultural History by Alberto Capatti… 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