Customer Reviews

Motorcycle (Reaktion Books - Objekt)

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This book explores the motorcycle as a design object, from its humble beginnings as a bicycle with a motor bolted onto it, through a century of design evolution and innovation to modern times. It turns a wide-angle lens on the history and development of the machine, and how people have reacted to it--both those who love it and those who hate it.
It focuses beyond the tunnel vision of the American landscape and bike industry to an international, multileveled, and complicated story, and rescues the motorcycle from triviality (in the US) by treating it as a serious engineering feat which has polarized societies since its inception.
A good companion read is Steven L. Thompson's "Bodies in Motion."

MOTORCYCLE is a fascinating look at this compelling "objekt" of power and beauty,and its great significance not only as a machine but as an aesthetic and pop cultural icon. The authors have provided interesting historical and social insights in their look at the motorcyle, and their lively prose is punctuated with compelling photographs. Alford and Ferriss have done a thoughtful,sophisticated job of analyzing the impact of the motorcycle on cultural imagination--and our ideas about motion, freedom, gender, and the future--as well as illustrating its importance in art, design, literature and film. Clearly, the motorcycle is much more than the sum of its parts, as this ambitious and well-wrought analysis shows. It makes one want to put on some goggles and hit the open road--with the book in one's pack, of course! Vroooom!

The book Motorcycle is for all those who want to know everything there is to know about the role that motorcycles have played (and continue to play) in the world's culture. My own fascination with them began in the early 1960s as I envied those fellow teenagers who had mopeds and Honda 50s. Freedom, cool, and speed are the words that come to my mind when I think of those days.

What is fascinating about this book is that it is everything you would expect a book about motorcycles not to be .... highly relevant and intelligent. Bring your brain ... it's a book to savor.