This wasn't quite what I was expecting — the title made me imagine a travel book or a piece of cycle advocacy, but actually it's more of a semi-random collection of short essays about cities, the people who live there, and the arts, inspired by Byrne's travels to different parts of the world in the course of his work as a musician. When he travels, he likes to take a folding bike with him and use that to explore, but the cycling per se is only a rather minor part of the story. The format of the book is said to be loosely modelled on W G Sebald, with a mix of first-hand impressions, rambling philosophical sidetracks, and black-and-white photos, but there's a lot more shooting from the hip and a lot less evidence of weeks spent researching stuff in libraries than you would get in an actual Sebald book. Which is fair enough: I don't think anyone would be buying this book expecting to get heavyweight academic delvings.

Byrne is clearly an intelligent, thoughtful person, and his situation in life allows him to meet interesting people in the course of his travels (assuming that you accept artists, gallery-owners and musicians as "interesting people"...), so this makes for a pleasant, lively read, but I don't think you will find anything very earth-shattering here, unless you are someone who loves motor cars and thinks of the USA as the model of perfect urban planning (in which case it might annoy you a little...). A good short-attention-span book to read on a journey or in a hospital waiting-room, probably. ( )

Byrne si fa leggere (soprattutto in vacanza) ma certa critica estremamente entusiasta pare volerci illudere che sia il libro di un intellettuale giramondo che dispensa perle di saggezza. Ma Byrne così intellettuale non è (il che non è mai un difetto e soprattutto non lo è se si è stati leader dei grandissimi Talking Heads) e spesso alle sue considerazioni di buon senso ti verrebbe da annuire consigliandogli qualche buona lettura. Al di là di questo, la pecca maggiore del libro è che in fondo vi si parla poco di bicicletta (pur salvandosi in corner nell'ultima parte). ( )

Nice little collection of essays about various cities that Byrne has biked in, with various musings about art, architecture, society, people, etc. A little too preachy sometimes- he tries not to be but it comes out. ( )

A nice meandering travel read discussing art, architecture, history, music, urban planning, and cycling. A pleasant side effect of reading David Byrne is listening to more Talking Heads. ( )

This memoir/travelogue, first published in 2008 and issued in paperback in 2010, features David Byrne’s observations of life in cities with varying degrees of bike friendliness. It’s not just about the bikes, though: he talks about art, culture, politics, architecture, and of course music. It’s a book with a lot of tangents, and some occasionally weird ones: for example, David is much more into contemporary art than I am, so that was some strange reading.

The book does contain a variety of photos, but the grayscale printing in the paperback edition makes them hard to process; a lot of the details are muddied.

I enjoyed this tour through David’s eyes and would love to see an updated edition where he goes back to some of these places, or maybe visits others and finds even more cool biking infrastructure. ( )