NONFICTION
Bicycle Diaries, by David Byrne, $25.95
Hitch a ride with former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne as he bikes around Detroit, Istanbul, London, San Francisco, Manila, New York — you name it. He cycles through cities bike-friendly and bike-hostile, musing on the myriad advantages (and disadvantages) of getting around on two wheels in places where, often, a man on a bike (a famous man, with shockingly white hair, no less) is a strange sight indeed.
But despite the title, this is no travel diary. Byrne’s reflections are as varied as the countries he visits: He muses on everything from urban planning to bike helmets to art criticism to Latin music, often on his bike (but not always).
Even if you don’t own a bike and have no plans to mount one, you’ll pedal through the pages of “Bicycle Diaries” in no time; the book is full of musings by a compelling eccentric.
Example: “Self-censorship is part of being a social animal, and in that sense, it’s not always a bad thing.”
Byrne has recently taken on bicycling promotion as a pet project, organizing cycling events in his hometown of New York City and designing bike racks to encourage cyclists — for environmental reasons, yes, but mostly because of the feeling of freedom biking affords.
Readers who just want to learn more about arguably the best band of the ’80s are in for a surprise: The art-school genius who told everyone to stop making sense has started making quite a lot of it.
NONFICTION
The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future, by Robert Darnton, $23.95
This book distills Robert Darnton’s years of musing — as a historian, university professor and librarian — on the history and future of the book, whether printed or electronic.
Although he is an unabashed partisan of books as they have existed since the codex replaced the scroll about 1,700 years ago, Darnton sees at least one ideal use for electronic publishing: to make widely available the results of scholarly research, with hyperlinks to the research itself where possible.
“Any historian who has done long stints of research,” Darnton writes, “knows the frustration over his inability to communicate the fathomlessness of the archives and the bottomlessness of the past.”
Cyberspace is the perfect solution, a medium in which such complexities can be not only suggested but also explored via links for the curious. At the end of this chapter (“E-Books and Old Books”), the director of the Harvard University Library makes clear how he thinks e-books will be classed: “as a supplement to, not a substitute for, Gutenberg’s great machine.”
Darnton is alarmed about another aspect of publishing: the loss of old newspapers in their physical form, a state of affairs that Nicholson Baker has also lamented. Both writers are incensed by the way in which some libraries toss out archived newspapers (and many other items) without alerting the public.
Darnton would change this, requiring “libraries that receive public money” to publish lists of their prospective throwaways, and he urges “libraries around the country (to) begin to save the country’s current newspaper output in bound form.”
