Customer Reviews

Motorcycle Mania: The Biker Book

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Motorcycle Mania is a stylish book that was created accompany or complement the large catalog for the landmark exhibition The Art of the Motorcycle held at New York's Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1998. Although the book covers the history of the motorcycle, its purpose is not to provide readers with a comprehensive account but to cover this essential two-wheeled device's evolution in an impressionistic way. I suspect that this book may actually have been intended to serve as a substitute for the official catalog, which was probably too weighty and expensive a volume for many casual fans.

Written by a host of contributors, but few of them with any apparent background in motor sports writing, Motorcycle Mania covers basic motorcycle engineering and styling, the rise of custom motorcycles in post-World War II America, the make-up of the motorcycling community, motorcycle clothing and gear, the motorcycle community including mainstream clubs and the biker gangs that the sport has long tried to live down and the motorcycle's image on the silver screen.

The book is nicely designed if in a somewhat jarring way, but there is not a great deal of coordination between the chapters. There are a nice series of images of classic motorcycles from early bicycle-derived designs to board track racers, to the first modern motorcycles in the 1920s up to stylish recent designs from Triumph and Ducati. Motorcycle Mania is now available very inexpensively on the used book front, so it will make a decent overview for someone with a casual interest in the subject, but for those who want something in depth, there are better books, including Phil Schlling's classic book on motorcycles.

The problem with Motorcycle Mania is that the material in manyof the book's chapters reveals the authors of those chapters asdabblers who contributed material to a book covering a topic that is highly technical and sophisticated without having any real background in what they were writing about. They've heard the myths and stereotypes about motorcycling, and that's the perspective most have chosen to write from. In chapters by the book's editor, and others, the written material seems to support what these folks think motorcycling is about, rather than what they would actually have known it's about if they had done as little as read one of the motorcycle magazines regularly. The title alone, "Motorcycle Mania, the Biker Book," seems to promise us that between the book's covers we will find material skewed by sensationalism and by questionable pop-cultural sensibilitites. How bad, how incomplete, is the thought that went into this book? Here are two examples:! On page 124 we read, "There are few things that make you feel so sexy...as a shiny red Ducati 916...." Really? And again, on page 109, in a caption to a picture showing world champion Mick Doohan cornering in the traditional manner with one of his knee-sliders gliding along the pavement's surface, his Honda leaned way over, "Skidding on his knees to the finish line, Australian Michael Doohan...." One basic rule is that it's good when captions accurately illustrate what's happening in the picture they accompany. Rarely is that the case here. Too bad. Much was possible with this concept. Little was achieved. One star is too good for it.