For four years, readers of The Herald-Sun newspaper (Durham, NC) enjoyed Phillip Barron's monthly columns on bicycling. The Outspokin' Cyclist gathers some of the best columns together in one volume. With insights into cold-weather bike commuting, urban design, the spiritual solitude of solo mountain biking, and the philosophical problems with drug use in competitive sports, Barron's columns offer glimpses into the life of a cyclist and a small city's biking community. The resulting book will appeal to residents of the Bull City as well as those unlucky enough not to know Durham, to cyclists as well as readers who simply enjoy a good story.
Devoted to the humanities, Phillip Barron is a writer and award-winning digital media artist living in Davis, California. His writings appear in academic journals as well as magazines, newspapers, and poetry journals. Barron has taught philosophy at the Chapel Hill and Greensboro campuses of the University of North Carolina, developed digital media projects at the National Humanities Center, and now works in digital history at the University of California, Davis.
He bikes to work every day on a 1989 Specialized Hard Rock mountain bike modified with an Xtracycle Free-Radical. This long-tail bike (pictured in The Outspokin' Cyclist) makes the car-free lifestyle easy. See photos and more at http://nicomachus.net/tag/xtracycle/
