111 of 118 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Man's Reach Should Exceed His Grasp, Even on A Bicycle, May 29, 2010
This review is from: The Lost Cyclist: The Epic Tale of an American Adventurer and His Mysterious Disappearance (Hardcover)
L.P. Hartley began a novel with the sentence: "The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there." And in his new book, "The Lost Cyclist," noted cycling historian David Herlihy introduces us to a most peculiar world, albeit with elements that we would still recognize. The book is actually two stories The first deals with Frank Lenz, a young bookkeeper from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who became a noted high-wheel bicycle racer in the late 1880s before recognizing his chance for fame and fortune would really come with the advent of a new kind of bicycle, the "safety bicycle," with new-fangled pneumatic tires. Frank Lenz decided to take advantage of the new invention, then in its infancy, and using his skills as a cyclist, and as a passionate amateur photographer, his achievement would be the first around-the-world solo cycling trip on a safety bike. To this end, he sought out sponsorship and arranged with the editor of New York's "Outing" magazine to send back stories and photos of his trip, which was expected to last two years.
He began his formal launch of the around-the-world tour on May 15, 1892 from Pittsburgh, setting out with a 57 pound Overman bicycle, 13 pounds of camera gear and 25 pounds of other equipment. He headed eastwards and in New York met worked with the editor of Outing to garner maximum publicity before beginning the trip proper on June 4, heading west and crossing the United States in five months. He was 25 years old.
Although Frank Lenz may have been slight in stature, weighing 145 pounds, he was clearly, as one witness is quoted in the book as saying, "he was quite a novel person-one possessed of great pluck, energy and determination..." He told a reporter who asked about the dangers of the trip: "I have nothing but the most pleasurable anticipation of my trip abroad. I have never encountered anything yet I have not overcome."
In the telling of Lenz's story, the author is clearly charmed by his cherubic protagonist and clearly wishes us to be as well. Frank Lenz was indeed an innocent abroad, and his letters home, written in his superb bookkeeper's script, are fascinating. It is easy to forget that in 1892, most people simply did not travel to foreign countries, let alone on a bicycle. His photos of Japan, his first stop after taking a steamer from California, are marvellous and he constantly comes across as a go-ahead, can-do and very good-humoured young man.
Along with the wide-eyed wonder, however, there was definitely danger. Travelling alone, speaking no languages except English and German, he was highly vulnerable. Although his writing tended to make light of the scrapes he gets into, some of them, such as an encounter with Chinese peasants, were quite terrifying. He managed to deflect their hostility by clowning around and using his bicycle to entertain them. The Chinese, most of whom had never seen a bicycle at all, threw stones and mud at him, and he often simply avoided encounters by riding at night through cities and towns.
His long, long ride in China came to an end as he headed next towards Burma. It is here that the real dangers become evident, as the roads are impassable and he hires coolies to basically carry his bike onwards. During the crossing of a rain-swollen river, one of the bearers drowns, and the reader begins to wonder how much of a toll Frank Lenz's dream ride will eventually take.
Making his way to India, he caught up with his enormous steamer trunk, full of spare parts and equipment, and basically built up a new bicycle. He had been on the road for a year and a half in his projected two year project, and there are indications of his weariness. But he continued undaunted through India (and today's Pakistan), visiting the Taj Mahal, and, as a good egalitarian American, expressed his dismay over India's caste system.
In mid-December 1893, "he found himself mired in the Makran Desert without food, water or shelter. Fortunately, a camel caravan came to his rescue." Shortly after, he entered Persia and by April was in Tabriz, where he met the Crown Prince of Persia, Mozaffar al-Din Shah. "A technology buff, he grilled Lenz about his gear and took copious notes...the prince himself took a photo of Lenz in the royal courtyard, mounted on his bicycle."
Although local Westerners urged him to go to Europe via Russia rather than Turkey, he was only 900 miles from Constantinople, and was looking forward to cycling in Germany, his ancestral homeland, with a Pittsburgh club mate. He missed pie and ice cream and while enjoying his trip, he wrote to the editor of Outing confessing his homesickness and how he longed for his wanderings to end.
The photo by the Persian Crown Prince, showing a pensive-looking (but surprisingly well-dressed) Lenz on what even then must have been an old-fashioned bicycle, is the last known photo of the adventurer. Because after April 1894, nothing was ever heard from Frank Lenz again.
This takes us to the second part of the book. Frank Lenz's mysterious disappearance caused great concern among his friends and readers and the editor of Outing endeavoured to find someone to look for him. After some false starts, William Sachtleben, another long-distance cyclist and seemingly cut from the same cloth as Lenz, went to pick up the trail. The author intersperses an account of Sachtleben's great cycling trip, with a companion, Thomas Allen, on a pair of solid-tired bicycles, riding in the opposite direction to Lenz. This too is an interesting story and probably adds some bulk to the book, which would probably be a bit thin if only about Frank Lenz himself.
The book now moves away from cycling to the political situation in Turkey. Sachtleben demanded action from the American Embassy and, unsatisfied with the results, launches his own investigation, hoping to shed light on the disappearance of Frank Lenz, recover his body, if possible, and see that any malefactors were punished. In spite of his furious activity, Sachtleben's mission ends in failure. We never learn for certain how Lenz died, a cyclist alone in Turkey, but we do know that his route took him into an area rife with ethnic tension between Turks, Kurds and Armenians. Sachtleben himself was to witness a massacre of Armenians by Kurds, and to learn that due process of law in America was nothing like due process in Turkey. The Turks, probably to placate Sachtleben, arrested some Armenians, who were probably completely innocent of Lenz's death, and two of them died in prison, bringing the number of deaths connected to Lenz's trip to four, including his own.
David Herlihy's book is highly entertaining, with an extraordinary cast of characters, and includes truly enchanting period photos of Lenz and Sachtleben & Allen. It was an era of handlebar mustaches and dirt roads and while sepia-toned, promised bright futures to adventurous young men. The craze for the bicycle in the United States would end, probably much sooner than Sachtleben or Lenz would have imagined, and their stories quickly forgotten. The author has done copious research and "the Lost Cyclist" is not only a worthy addition to any cyclist's bookshelf, but is in itself revealing social history of a world in transition.
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35 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fascinating and Thoroughly Enjoyable, May 3, 2010
This review is from: The Lost Cyclist: The Epic Tale of an American Adventurer and His Mysterious Disappearance (Hardcover)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Full disclosure: I'm an avid bicyclist, with a small collection of bicycle-abilia, so this book had me from the title. But just because a subject is enticing doesn't always mean the book will be.
I'm pleased to report that The Lost Cyclist is a meticulously researched, fast-paced, supremely readable book that had me staying up later than I'd intended several nights in a row just so I could keep reading.
Focusing on what today is a mere footnote in cycling history, the book is really the story of two--even three--bicyclists whose exploits gripped the nation over a century ago, and only one of whom was actually lost. Frank Lenz, of the title, was an accountant and promising bicycle racer in the era of high-wheelers, but for a variety of reasons, never realized his potential. Inspired by the accounts of Thomas Stevens, who had traveled by bike on three continents and written about and sketched what he saw, Lenz aspired to cycle around the world too, only he would undertake his trip on a "safety bicycle," the new-fangled design that had two wheels of equal size and, in his case, inflatable tires. And he would travel with a camera, taking photographs of the sights.
Ambitious, entrepreneurial, intrepid and naive, Lenz successfully solicited the support of Outing magazine to underwrite his dream. He started in New York, then pedaled across the U.S. to San Francisco, where he hopped a ship to Japan and then to China. Embarking on the Asian portion of his itinerary, he encountered harsh conditions and xenophobia, particularly in China, but made his way to Burma, through India, Persia and finally to Turkey, which was experiencing considerable unrest on the eve of the Armenian massacres. And it was there that he disappeared.
Concurrently, Herlihy tells the story of cyclists Will Sachtleben and Thomas Allen, who successfully toured across Europe and into Asia from the other direction, but opted for safer modes of transportation where necessary. They too published an account of their tour.
When it was clear that Lenz was missing, Outing's publisher dispatched Sachtleben to Turkey to try to piece together what had happened to him. The political situation and Sachtleben's own impetuous temperament impeded his mission, but he returned home with some idea of Lenz's fate.
Herlihy has painted a vivid picture of 1890s America and the craze for bicycles, as well as the realities of bicycle touring before paved roads (the League of American Wheelmen was instrumental in promoting paved roads long before cyclists were forced to share them with cars) and in remote, largely unexplored regions of countries that had seen few foreign visitors. It's a testament to his skill as a writer and researcher that despite the intervening 115 or so years, he brings his main characters to life and makes you feel as if you know them. I kept thinking that there's potential for a movie in this story, though I'm sure Herlihy and his publisher already have that covered.
My only quibbles are minor. The narrative slows a bit in the second half, where Sachtleben is in Turkey, and Herlihy uses uncommon foreign terms that are not always defined (or if they were, I missed the explanations), and I didn't always get the gist from the context. (What is the porte in Turkey? I guessed that it was its governing body but don't remember seeing it explained.) Because I was reading an advance reading copy, I didn't have the benefit of the index to help me find the terms. It may be that the final book will have a glossary as well, which would be a welcome addition. I also had some trouble keeping track of all the minor players who came and went. Again, having the index could have helped me refresh my memory.
The index will be addressed in the final book, so it's moot for most readers, and overall, I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in history, travel and adventure and especially bicycling. It's a damn good tale, well-told.
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23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Wheels within wheels., May 13, 2010
This review is from: The Lost Cyclist: The Epic Tale of an American Adventurer and His Mysterious Disappearance (Hardcover)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
I was not aware of the events portrayed in this book. Further, I haven't been on a bicycle in several decades. The former was set right by the reading of this book. The latter is something I hope continues.
Herlihy's writing of the dawn of bicycle racing and foreign treks via two-wheels was quite enlightening. The story of Frank Lenz's journey was spotty due to the limited communications from him due to his locations. And, of course, much of the story of his disappearance must be conjecture.
There are different styles of writing here. Much is reportorial and many times doesn't really capture the emotion of the people in the story. Herlihy lost several opportunities to draw us closer to the locations described.
The photographs are great and significantly add to the book. The few maps included, however, do far too little to graphically show not only the locations, but also the great distances and geographical challenges Lenz and the others faced. Since those challenges were a major part of the book, more graphic information would have really added to the story.
The epilogue is mainly too philosophical and of little help in closing the story. Hindsight is, proverbially, twenty-twenty and postmortems are of necessity full of speculation. These what-ifs did not really add to the book.
Another negative was the continued use of certain buzz words. Too often I felt I was reading a story by a sports writer. I love sports, but their overuse of the same descriptive words is legend. After so many instances of 'globe girdler' and similar by Herlihy, I was ready to scream. The four stars are for the story being told. The writing, though, wasn't up to that level.
This should be of interest to readers with an interest in many fields - bicycling, travel, history, etc. The negatives don't outweigh the reading this little known story.
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