Tips & Reviews

Ballad of the Whiskey Robber: A True Story of Bank Heists, Ice Hockey, Transylvanian Pelt Smuggling, Moonlighting Detectives, and Broken Hearts By Julian Rubinstein You won’t believe it’s true. With a title like that, who wouldn’t be skeptical?  Open the… Read full article

Galileo’s Daughter: A Drama of Science, Faith and Love by Dava Sobel I read this fascinating book during the last two weeks I spent at my families’ farm in Italy this summer, and I must agree with the editor’s assessment… Read full article

In the Wake of the Plague by Norman F. Cantor In the Wake of the Plague by Norman F. Cantor, 2001, pp. 232. Did you know that the children’s rhyme ‘Ring Around the Rosies’ was first sung in sixteenth-century England… Read full article

Paris, by Émile Zola (1898) Émile Zola was one of France’s most astute social critics at the end of the nineteenth century.  A prolific writer, he embarked on a 20-volume series of novels in the 1870s about corruption in French… Read full article

cellspacing=”0″ cellpadding=”0″ width=”100%” summary=”” border=”0″> Spoke Songs/Metal Cowboy   Spokesongs (Bicycle Adventures on Three Continents) by Willie Weir     Metal Cowboy (Tales from the Road Less Pedaled) by Joe Kurmaskie   Bicycling is very much a solitary sport: first,… Read full article

In the Company of the Courtesan by Sarah Dunant In the Company of the Courtesan by Sarah Dunant New York: Random House, 2006, pp. 371. Since I greatly enjoyed Sarah Dunant’s The Birth of Venus , I read her most… Read full article

Travel Photography: A Selection of Books & Resources Winter comes to the Colorado Front Range sometime in November. For me, it’s always sort of a sad time, because it means putting away my bike for the winter and finding something… Read full article

My Life on Two Wheels My Life on Two Wheels By Clifford L. Graves (Manivelle Press, La Jolla, CA; 1985) The history of Americans touring Europe by bicycle is yet to be written. When it is, it will likely begin… Read full article

The Broker by John Grisham In the author’s notes in The Broker John Grisham admits he has a high-tech phobia. His word processor he writes, is a thirteen-year-old piece of equipment. "When it stutters. . . When it finally quits… Read full article

The Words of Bernfrieda, A Chronicle of Hauteville by Gabriella Brooke NOTE: For those of you traveling with us to Southern Italy, or simply interested in finding out more about this region, we’ve included an annotated reading list at the… Read full article

The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century by Thomas L. Friedman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005)   When I began graduate school in geography at the University of Oregon in the early 1970s some of the… Read full article

Landscapes of Cycling by Graham Watson If you go to see The Race in person, you will see Graham Watson (also known as “Photo 1”) on the race course – he is the man on the back of a motor… Read full article

House of Niccoló by Dorothy Dunnet I have a friend who was so taken with Dorothy Dunnett’s eight volume series based on the travels of a 15th century Flanders businessman and adventurer that she planned a trip around his base… Read full article

A Passion for Piedmont: Italy’s Most Glorious Regional Table by Matt Kramer (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1997) With the winter Olympics coming up in February 2006 in Italy’s Piedmont region we thought we might suggest some reading… Read full article