A few months ago I received a request to blurb a book called Zen and Now: On the Trail of Robert Pirsig and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Mark Richardson. I’d never written a blurb before, didn’t know the author or the editor and I’d never worked for the publisher, but I was just about to spend ten days at a cottage on Georgian Bay so figured I’d give the book a shot.
While I’m not a motorcycle guy and I still haven’t read the pink paperback version of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance that I bought as a university student, I loved Richardson’s book. While his road trip was much different than the one I did for DRIVE, reading about it certainly brought back a lot of great memories. And it made me add a motorcycle road trip to my list of things I’d like to do before I kick.
Anyway, Zen and Now is just hitting the bookstores and my blurb is on the back cover of the Canadian edition: “By following the tire tracks of a book that changed his life, Mark Richardson has created a classic of his own. As wise as it is well-written, as touching as it is compelling, Zen and Now is a journey that’s sure to inspire a new generation of pilgrims to hop on their motorcycles and head west.”
Brooklyn resident Tom Vanderbilt, who has written about design, technology, science, and culture for Wired, Slate and the New York Times, has a new book called Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), which needless to say I am looking forward to reading. He’s generated lots of great advance buzz — and this blurb from James Surowiecki, the author of The Wisdom of Crowds and a must-read New Yorker columnist: “Tom Vanderbilt is one of our best and most interesting writers, with an extraordinary knack for looking at everyday life and explaining, in wonderful and entertaining detail, how it really works. That’s never been more true than with Traffic, where he takes a subject that we all deal with (and worry about), and lets us see it through new eyes. In the process, he helps us understand better not just the highway, but the world. It doesn’t matter whether you drive or take the bus–you’re going to want to read this book.”
Tom also has a excellent companion blog called How We Drive.
Chris Turner is one of the best non-fiction writers in the country, as anyone who’s read his entertaining first book, Planet Simpson, or his work in various magazine and newspapers knows. His latest book, The Geography of Hope, came out last fall, and it’s a stunner.
Along with the stylish writing we’ve come to expect from him, the research is truly impressive, but what really blew me away was how smart it is. Turner travelled the world to see examples of sustainable living: housing, buildings, communities, transportation systems and so on. There’s even a good chapter on cars. Toward the end, he has a great — and, bizarrely, relevant — riff on The Big Lebowski, the brilliant Coen Brothers classic.
Best of all, though, is the optimism that fills the book. The Geography of Hope is an inspiring look at the world as it could be. Yes we can, indeed.
I don’t know why the people who write display copy for magazines have to be such wankers, but the June issue of Toronto Life offers a blatant example of words used to sell a story that bear little relationship to that story. The dek for Philip Preville’s piece “All the Rage” is: “The tension between drivers and cyclists has escalated to swearing, punching, bird-flipping hysteria. City hall thinks additional bike lanes will calm everybody down. What if they’re wrong?”
Leaving aside the egregious grammatical error — city hall is singular, they is plural — I was shocked because the display copy sells the article as an attack on bike lanes. Now, Preville is a smart guy, an excellent writer and someone with many sensible thoughts on car culture (check out his Preville on Politics blog). Could he really be against bike lanes? Was he really anti-cycling? Well, no, of course not. The piece, which is well worth reading, is about the relationship between cyclists and drivers — and he barely mentions bike lanes.
Pick up a copy of the June issue of The Walrus to read “Geared Up,” an excellent piece on cycling by Bill Reynolds. “I ride to work, the DVD shop, the fruit and vegetable stand, the theatre, the mall, a gig, the bar, the bank machine,” he writes. “It seems the practical, economical thing to do. I’m not against cars. I own one — a beat-up 1991 Buick Regal my dad sold me at a price only a parent would set — but I prefer not to use it.”But as Reynolds shows us in the story, riding a bike in our car-conquered society isn’t exactly safe.
You can read it here, but I recommend buying a copy of the magazine, especially since it’s a long article. (Full disclosure: Bill is a friend and colleague.)
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Update: The Spacing site also loves “Geared Up” and the post is generating some comments.