{"id":2945,"date":"2020-06-27T18:16:32","date_gmt":"2020-06-28T02:16:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=2945"},"modified":"2020-06-27T18:16:33","modified_gmt":"2020-06-28T02:16:33","slug":"review-the-bicycle-diaries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/?p=2945","title":{"rendered":"Review: The Bicycle Diaries"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><em>The Bicycle Diaries<\/em> was an unexpected gem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This is a discursive window into <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/David_Byrne\">David Byrne<\/a>&#8216;s thoughts, tied together by some connection to his experiences commuting by bicycle in cities around the world.  I&#8217;m generally interested in people&#8217;s bicycling impressions, so I decided to check it out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Byrne turns out a fascinating and thought-provoking collection of essays about bikes, art, human nature, urbanization and gentrification, music, and a few more topics I can&#8217;t recall at the moment.  These are organized by the cities in which his commutes sparked the thoughts.  They&#8217;re too well written to be off-the-cuff, but each one gives the impression of sitting down with an articulate friend in a coffee shop or bar and catching up.  Though he usually starts from bicycling, he often winds up somewhere unexpected, which is the way many of my rides go, too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>That kind of format only works when the author has interesting things to say, and Byrne does. I found him surprisingly honest and forthright.  He puts some ideas and observations on the page that a more timid author would shy away from for fear of offending people.  I found all of his thoughts worth chewing on, even when I disagreed or quibbled about how he expressed them.  My only regret was that I couldn&#8217;t actually converse with him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>A must.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Bicycle Diaries was an unexpected gem. This is a discursive window into David Byrne&#8216;s thoughts, tied together by some connection to his experiences commuting by bicycle in cities around the world. I&#8217;m generally interested in people&#8217;s bicycling impressions, so I decided to check it out. Byrne turns out a fascinating and thought-provoking collection of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2945"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2945\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2948,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2945\/revisions\/2948"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}