RECOMMENDED READING
Bike Races and Faces
Whether you are looking for a bedtime story for your baby activist or a guide to community organizing to sway your local community board, Transportation Alternatives has a book to recommend.
Born to Ride: A Story About Bicycle Face
By Larissa Theule and Kelsey Garrity-Riley
In this children’s historical fiction book, a determined young girl in Rochester, New York, teaches herself to ride a bike amid the backdrop of the women’s suffrage movement. After being warned by her brother that when girls ride bikes, their faces get stuck in an ugly “bicycle face,” Louise Belinda Bellflower faces sexism and her fears of a two-wheeler in this story of courage and freedom for women and girls.
Recommended by Communications Director (and dad of two) Joe Cutrufo
On Bicycles: A 200-Year History of Cycling in New York City
By Evan Friss
Long before Robert Moses made New York into a car city, the Big Apple was a bike town. From the first-ever ban on bicycles in 1819, to Ed Koch’s losing fight against Transportation Alternatives and New York City’s bike messenger community in the 1980s, riding a bike has always been a political act. This concise history tells the story of how bicycling shaped New York and mirrors the ever-changing metropolis.
Recommended by Queens Organizer Juan Restrepo
The World’s Fastest Man: The Extraordinary Life of Cyclist Major Taylor, America’s First Black Sports Hero
By Michael Kranish
At the height of Jim Crow, a black man named Marshall Walter Taylor rode his way through impossible racial barriers to become the fastest cyclist in the world. In this investigative history, the full story of the life of the man known as “Major Taylor” is told, from Madison Square Garden, where he rode, and won, his first professional races, to the career-long physical attacks he survived from white cyclists who he competed against, and bested, on the track.
Recommended by Co-Deputy Director Marco Conner
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