Book review: Life is a Wheel, by Bruce Weber
In Life is a Wheel, New York Times writer Bruce Weber chronicles his 79-day, 6,595-kilometre pedal from Astoria, Oregon, back to his apartment in Lower Manhattan.
by Bruce Weber
Scribners
4 stars
In , writer Bruce Weber chronicles his 79-day, 6,595-kilometre pedal from Astoria, Oregon, back to his apartment in Lower Manhattan.
The book fuses first-person accounts of granny-gearing the Rockies with larger musings about life, death, love, friendship, family and the country he's heading across: a vast, strange, serene, contradictory and ridiculously scenic America.
This was Weber's second transcontinental cycling jaunt: he first traversed the US in 1993, when he hadn't yet hit 40. Now he's 57, fit but not without health issues: acid reflux, an occasional episode of gout, myopia, tinnitus in the ear, spinal stenosis in the neck. And a tendency to fall melancholy.
One seismic shift is technological: there was no blogging, tweeting, Facebooking or GPS tracking the first time Weber rode solo across the US. This time, fellow cyclists offer route advice or join him for ride-alongs. Old friends meet up, new friends offer a bed for the night, or deliver a pie. Followers of his blog post encouragement, recommendations, routes to take, bike shops, bars.
The kindness of strangers, even in a country fiercely divided into red and blue states, is much in evidence.
isn't just journal entries. Weber loses a best friend to cancer in the early weeks of his ride, parks his bike and takes a plane to Los Angeles for the memorial service, where he delivers a eulogy.
This is a memoir, full of reflections about growing up in suburban New Jersey, about romance, relationships and regrets. There are chapters about another cycling trip Weber took, too: the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Vietnam, in 1994, a surreal, scary, comic adventure that could make a great movie.
This book is for cyclists, certainly, and for anyone who has ever dreamed of such transcontinental travels. But it also should prove enlightening, soul-stirring, even, to those who don't care a whit about bikes but who care about the way people connect - strangers, friends, parents and children, lovers.
