Customer Reviews

Bicycle Diaries

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

David Byrne is a smart, funny, artistic sort of fellow whose talents, inclination and curiosity have led him all over the world. A few decades back, David discovered folding bicycles and since then he's ridden his bicycle along the side and back roads of many cities, riding, thinking, chatting, living life and seeing how it's lived in a wide range of places. His view of the world seen from a bicycle saddle gives him "glimpses into the mind of my fellow man, as expressed in the cities he lives in." Now, his meditations on people, places and the various ways we get along and get around are collected in his new book, Bicycle Diaries.

Bicycle Diaries is the best kind of art, a work that brings the reader along on the artist's journey. Bicycle Diaries is a physically beautiful book, hardcover with no dust-jacket, yellow embossed letters cheerfully identify the title and author while a black silhouette of a rider draws the reader forward. An observant reader will notice a tiny bicycle peeking out from the spine at the bottom of page 11 and on each odd page thereafter the bicycle has makes more progress. Fanning forward through the pages sets the tiny typeset bicycle free, racing across the pages in the oldest style animation, persistent vision holding tight to the bike while the pages blur past. Ever the artist, be it in music, lyric, print, or type, David remembers that a book can be more than just a file on a Kindle.

The tiny animation is just one example of the playful digressiveness of this book. While he casts a loving and critical look at the world, David is always conversational. He ponders, rants, muses and marvels. He reflects on how our cities reflect our minds. We build what we value, but our shaped world shapes those values. In an age where it seems that every celebrity has a publicist and a book that screams "look at me", David is instead riding his bike down interesting streets and pausing now and then to say "Hey, look at that!" He profiles interesting buildings, streets, people, cities and artists. He's structured the book as a series of chapters each concentrating on a city such as Berlin, Buenos Aires, Istanbul, Sydney or New York, but the book is not a mere travelogue. In Manila, he uses the life story of Imelda Marcos as a springboard for contemplation of the way we each build the mythic stories of our lives. In Buenos Aires he considers geography, faith, death, music, art, unemployment, sex, the pack behavior of dogs, politics, football, gentrification, nightlife, and worker ownership. In every place he rides, he finds the unique and the common and connects the local with the global.

Bicycle Diaries is an intensely human and humane book, a book that echoes in print the sense of "My God, how did I get here?" that David expressed years ago in the Talking Heads. To an interesting person like David, all places are interesting and he consistently reminds us just how interesting humans are. We are the ones building the human world -- we don't just travel the world, we make it. David's work takes him out in the world, a world he shapes with songs and images. As he's ridden more, in more places, he's become more of a cycle activist, using his talents to shape the world to be friendlier to humans and bicycles. He's designed and installed bike racks in New York City, he thinks about helmet design and he works with transportation planners. And most importantly, he's written a wonderful book, a book that reveals the simple delight of riding a bike through an amazing world.

David Byrne is an enormously creative and thoughtful composer, artist and performer. He's also a cyclist and a world traveler which makes him a kindred soul. These attributes prompted me to buy the Kindle edition of the book and, while my expectations were not very high, this book probably should have remained a magazine article. In the acknowledgments David says it was a publisher/editor who convinced him that there was a book here and the author would have done well to ignore the advice. It is really a collection of thoughts inspired by David's bike rides in cities around the world and, while it is modestly entertaining, the thoughts inspired by his two-wheeled meandering are not particularly original or earth-shaking. I found myself abandoning the book about half-way through which is something I almost never do. The writing itself is not bad, but I just don't think he has enough to say to make this work as a book. I remain a David Byrne fan and I'll look out for his next effort, but I wouldn't recommend buying the book.

Not only is the title of this book misleading, so is the marketing and hype about it. Supposedly, this book was to convey Byrne's observations and interpretations from the saddle of his bike as he pedaled through cities and suburbs of some of the world's most interesting venues (e.g., Berlin, New York]. Would that it were such. Being an urban bike rider who observes the life and rigors of urban living from my bike saddle, I thought this would be a great read. Well I was wrong. In fact, if this book had not been a gift to me (because it was on my 2009 Christmas list), I would say I was ripped off.

Some sections of the book do describe what is seen, heard, and thought while riding a bike. The description of riding from a section of Buffalo (actually, he was in a suburb at the start of the ride, and he eschews suburbs to a fare thee well) to Niagara Falls is one such description as is his account of riding from downtown Detroit to, and past, 8-Mile Road, but even these are brief, sketchy in observation, and woefully lacking in understanding and interpretation. Yeah, Byrne has numerous comments about rust belt cities, but nothing he thinks or says is a reflection of what he has actually seen from his bike--his comments are just stereotypic notions about Buffalo and Detroit (at least his text about Buffalo did not mention snow) that could have been embroidered into a discussion without ever leaving a pent-house condo in ever-growing cities such as Atlanta, Houston, or Los Angeles. His thoughts have little to do with what he actually saw on his trips, because he missed many important sites and many of those sites he did note, he failed to interpret wisely.

I have made the Buffalo to Niagara Falls ride at least a dozen times (though I have sense enough not to ride the dangerous-to-bicylists Maple Road past Hooters (now closed), Fuddruckers, Commerce Drive and Sweethome Road as he did on his ride) and have walked from downtown Detroit to 8-Mile Road at least three times, and I could write a great deal more than a few paragraphs from what I have seen from just those experience and and still avoid the cliches of Detroit not being there anymore and dissing franchise chain restaurants. What he says about cities is actually sophomoric--not wrong, just not astute and woefully lacking in insight and resolution.

But the real kicker about this book is not that he fails to see much from his bike rides, it is that most of the book has nothing to do with bike rides. He goes on to a great extent about Baltimore, Berlin and other cities without even mentioning bicycling. A better title for this book would have been The Musings of a Man Sitting Late at Night in His Hotel Room When Visiting Some of the Great Cities of the World in Which I Rode a Bike Once in a While.

If you are a David Byrne fan and want to know more about what he thinks about this and that of urban and suburban life and his comments on certain cities, then this book might interest you; but if you think you are picking up a book by a bicylist who describes his observations and thoughts while biking some of the great cities of the world, this is not the book for you.

This book is super fun to read. Hang out in David Byrne's front pocket as he travels the world and shares his perceptions about the hidden dynamics behind the socio-political environments of world cities. He somehow perfectly captures the moods and vibes of these places while sharing his interesting personal opinions of current affairs along the way. A leisurely read that I highly recommend.

David Byrne, founder of the band "Talking Heads," has compiled a series of short essays about bicycling in cities around the world. The bicycling essays are accompanied by additional essays about music, friendship, city planning, and the scale of human communities that were inspired by thoughts that sprang into Mr. Bryne's head while he was riding his bicycle, visiting with colleagues, and performing. Mr. Byrne is an unabashed liberal, and he doesn't suffer fools lightly; I got the impression that he's of an age (mid-50s) and financially comfortable enough that he doesn't have to take any guff from anyone. His perspective is refreshing.

Having enjoyed the book, I have to point out that there's not much here that hasn't been said before, especially about city planning. I enjoyed the bicycling essays the most, and especially enjoyed his reflections about bicycling in New York (where Mr. Byrne lives), in other American cities, and in Berlin; the essays about other world cities were not as fully developed. The recollections of interactions with musical colleagues might be interesting to fans of world music, but I hurried through most of them. A good (but not great) read, and a gentle introduction to city planning for those not already familiar with the basics. The book is 291 pages long, but the pages are small and there are lots of photographs.

This book is about how David Bryne used a bike to help him visit various places on his musical tours around the planet. Bryne seems to have few deep feelings for bicycling, and he offers little in the way of insights to the places he visited on his bike. For him, a bike is a means of transportation and that is about it. He could have walked to any of the locations he visited and conveyed the same vapid impressions of those sites. Yes, he has been lots of places and used a bike to expand his horizons, but his writing did little to interest me and he offered nothing but the most shallow of impressions of the places he visited. This book is much overrated. If you are a bike rider, you won't learn anything about how to use that bike to visit new places or even get tips on riding for pleasure. If you are a traveler, you won't gain any new insights to our world. This book is a time sink.

I wanted to love this book, it touches on issues that are important to me. Cities, bikes, urban planning, travel, other cultures, exotic places. And it's David Byrne, who's pro-urban writings I've read before. But the end result is somewhat disappointing. The book is extremely uneven. Byrne is at his best when he's talking about what is in front of him. Describing the wastelands of Detroit, historic neighborhoods of Manila, the communist architecture of former East Berlin, a blackout in New York. But too often Byrne turns down philosophical and historical alleys where the pieces just dead end. He'll raise a question (often policy related), but then neither explore it in enough depth to be of any use to the reader, or offer any ideas to that specific problem. It's not a policy book, but it surfaces issues but then fails to provide any solutions or answers, or even solid details. It leaves you scratching your head as to what was the point of reading that? It often reads like a blog, poorly edited without continuity. The book is broken into sections by city, but often the content rarely relates to that specific city. The Manila, Sydney, and Berlin chapters would have been better off described as Phillipines, Australia, and Germany. There may only be a page or two on the actual city, followed by long diversions that often seem pointless, with no end or payoff for the reader. Having been to many of the cities Byrne writes about, I yearned for more detail of the built environment, the atmosphere of these places, of the true experience of biking in these places, of what's being done to make them more bike friendly. Instead the reader often gets vaguely unanswered philosophical diversions which just ring empty. The book is somewhat vindicated in the last two chapters and epilogue. The Sydney chapter is truly entertaining when discussing the deadly flora and fauna of the continent. The New York chapter dispenses with the philosophical ramblings and talks about the specifics of bicycling in New York and the efforts to make the city a more bike friendly place. The epilogue should have been the introduction, with a dose of urban planning history (with the usual deserved nods to Jane Jacobs) and some practical information about biking in the city. I enjoyed reading about Byrnes adventures, the characters he meets, the galleries he visits, but too often the book just sags when he heads down these deadend alleys. I would have loved a little more history, a little more of what governments are doing to help cities, a little more observations of the places he visits. It's worth reading, but I was definitely a little disappointed.

My wife borrowed this book from library; we are both cyclists.

Interesting musings about life, cities, travel, the art business & biking. Byrne is a little all over the place with his insights and some of the details about modern art and the art business became too much. But overall, interesting and enjoyable.

While Byrne's approach to green living and touring is commendable, his primary reason for biking when visiting cities is that this is his desired way of seeing (experiencing) them. All bicyclists know you can notice so many more details about a place when on a bike than in a car or bus. Most of us wouldn't consider the bother of schlepping a fold-up bike via airplane to do so or biking to a business meeting. Lucky for Byrne that he can bike without sweating too much; I am not so lucky so I must wear spandex and shower after.

I wouldn't have the guts to bike some of the places Byrne does, even though I am not afraid to bike into downtown Boston (I can handle jerky drivers, especially if I know where I'm going.)

As following shows, the travel info. sometimes gets extended from the cities the chapters are named for: the Sydney chapter includes details about Byrne's flight into the center of the Australian continent and his driving where the roads are deserted.

Funny scene: Byrne helps an Australian man pull his car from where it was stuck in a ditch with his 4 wheel drive rental car. Then the Australian fool says he wants to drive the car back into the same ditch, as that's the direction he wants to go. Byrne tells the Australian that he's not going to pull his car out again and he won't be back for days and leaves right away.

I recommend this for those who like to read about travel, cities, biking or Byrne. Its a book which can be read over a long period of time as the various chapters do not build upon one another

This book originates from a blog and consists of collected jottings, many on the urban environment, others on music, yet others of a sociological or philosophical nature.

Rather impressionistic, they provide refreshing views on various cities across the world: Detroit, Berlin, Istanbul, San Francisco, Sydney, London, Manila, New York, etc.

The writing style is rough and unpolished but in full harmony with the contents. The book is illustrated with the author's own black and white photographs.

Though by no means earth-shattering, this work will be of interest to anyone concerned with cities and urban development in general.

David Byrne takes us around the world where he assembles his bicycle in his hotel room and takes to the streets of the world's great cities. The tales generally aren't about the bike. He does give the reader a general overview what what cycling is like in places such as New York, London, Berlin, and Manila. But his rich and well told stories involve the people he meets, and quite frankly, is far more interesting than reading about someone pedaling.

I gave the book four stars instead of five only because the narratives wandered at times and I had a hard time figuring out where he was going with some of the stories.

If you were a Talking Heads fan back in the day you'll enjoy the book. Same if you enjoy cycling or simply enjoy reading about everyday people in exotic locales. It's an easy, enjoyable read and I'm glad I added it to my collection.