The World's Fastest Man

Kranish, Michael. The World's Fastest Man: The Extraordinary Life of Cyclist Major Taylor, America's First Black Sports Hero New York: Simon and Schuster 2019. Print.

First Sentences:

 

On the clear, brisk Saturday afternoon of December 5, 1896, an unusual pair of men strode to New York City's Madison Square Garden, where thousands would soon assemble for one of the era's greatest sporting events.

Description:

On a bike path near my house is a plaque detailing the life and sports achievements of Marshall "Major" Taylor, a Black bicycle racer in the 1890s - early 1900s era. I had never heard of him and, after reading some of the details of his achievements, just had to explore the story behind this man. This quest led me to Michael Kranish's The World's Fastest Man: The Extraordinary Life of Cyclist Major Taylor, America's First Black Sports Hero,

Just to set the scene for you. Imagine for a moment the world of the 1880s: no radio, no television, no automobiles, no airplanes, not even everyday bicycles. The Penny-Farthing bike had just been introduced, the one with a gigantic front wheel and a tiny wheel in the back. There were extremely popular as the fastest form of transportation available. Women were allowed to ride them in public as well.

This was also the age of the US Supreme Court's Plessy vs. Fergeson decision, the "separate but equal" discrimination case that would usher in the Jim Crow attitude and laws of prejudice and ill-treatment of minorities nationwide.

Marshall Taylor at that time was a poor Black child growing up in Indianopolis. His father had secured a job as a carriage driver for a wealthy White family, and Marshall accompanied him because the family had a similarly-age boy in need of a playmate. 

Taylor became part of that family, receiving the environment, food, education, and gifts exactly as his rich friend received. One gift was a new bicycle which Taylor soon mastered, perfecting trick-riding as well.

It was Mark Twain who, after describing his many crashes as he learned to ride a high-wheeler, wrote: "Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live."

Taylor secured a position at a local bicycle shop. Hundreds of these design/sales/repair shophad sprung up across the country, including the Wright brothers who started designing bicycles abd later flying machines in their own shop. While performing tricks at the shop to attract customers, decked out in a military-style jacket, Taylor received the nickname "Marshall."

There, Taylor was noticed by a world champion professional rider, Louis de Franklin "Birdie" Munger, once the fastest bicyclist in the world. Munger, near the end of his competition days, took Taylor under his wing and introduced him to Munger's own experimental bicycle with equal-sized, inflatable tires. 

Munger trained Taylor and entered him in his first race at age 18, much to the surprise of Taylor who did not know he would be competing that day. Incredibly, Taylor won and his career as a competitive bicylist began.

These are just the first few pages of this incredible story of Taylor, a poverty-stricken Black youth who, at the turn of the century and duting the birth and mania for bicycles, competed and won sprint (1/2 - 1 miles) races all over the country and world to attract the attention and paying spectators to his competitions. 

Of course, he experienced jealous riders, bigotry, and the pitfalls of travel and riches. Taylor devoted himself to new physical fitness and weight training exercises, and embraced a highly restricted diet, training techniques unknown in that era. On top of everything else, he promised his church deacons he would never race on Sundays. He even had to overcome his frequent failure to properly count his laps, often pulling up thinking he had won the race when he still had a lap or two to go, and had to sprint to catch up to the field and win.

Taylor's competitors made him a marked man, cutting him off, trying to knock over his bike, hoping to make him crash at full speed. Taylor soon realized that every time he went on the track his life was endangered.

But what a story author Kranish presents us, full of hope, frustration, inspiration, danger, and challenges of bicycle racing in those days, along with a well-researched description of society, the evolution of bicycles, and the eventual entrance of the automobile. 

Journey back in time to follow one forgotten man's rise to international fame on a two-wheeled contraption. It is well worth your time.

 

[If this book interests you, be sure to check out:] 

  

Krabb, Tim. The Rider  

Fascinating modern memoir of an Irish bicycle racer who carefully details his thoughts, strategies, competitor evaluation, and dreams throughout several arduous races. (Soon to be reviewed.)

Happy reading.

Fred

 

Click here to browse over 470 more book recommendations by subject or title

(and read the introduction to The First Sentence Reader).

 

Lands of Lost Borders

Harris, Kate. Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road. New York: Knopf 2018. Print

First Sentences:

The end of the road was always just out of sight. 

 

Cracked asphalt deepened to night beyond the reach of our headlamps, the thin beams swallowed by a blackness that receded before us no matter how fast we biked. Light was a kind of pavement thrown down in front of our wheels, and the road went on and on. If I even reach the end, I remember thinking, I'll fly off the rim of the world.


Description:

Thus begins Kate Harris's Lands of Lost Borders: A Journey on the Silk Road. It depicts one of the author's many dangerous efforts to elude unfriendly border guards in China, Tibet, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkey, India, and other countries in retracing the ancient route of Marco Polo on a bicycle.

Author Harris is a confirmed explorer. From her earliest age, she had a restlessness to her dreams. Although a gifted student in biological sciences at Oxford and MIT, her ongoing goal was to take a one-way trip to help establish a colony on Mars. She even participated in a Mars simulation experience complete with desert living in regulation space suits.

Harris, a voracious reader and researcher throughout her life, always was fascinated to read about into the personalities and adventures of early explorers like Marco Polo, Magellan, Mrs. Fanny Bullock Workman, and Alexandra David-Neel. She eventually quit her research job in a windowless lab (staring at "planktonic fecal pellets" through a microscope and recording minute changes). Then, she charted a cross-continent route using ancient maps and out-of-date atlases, grabbed her childhood girlfriend Mel, loaded up their bicycles, and set off to pedal on a year-long trip from Turkey to India, following the route of Marco Polo. 

Along the way, they live on dried noodles, stale water, and the often unusual food and shelter offered from the locals who could neither speak English (and Harris does not speak their language) nor understand what the women are doing on bicycles on these high ranges. The cyclists are continually stopped by police (who mostly want to pose with the women and try out their bicycles), pushed off pot-holed highways by monstrous trucks, and even chased by wild yaks.

As we sped down the pass, every little bump and divot and pebble on the road blurred together into a pavement of pure concussion. Such is the price you pay to reach forbidden Tibet; pain in the legs, in the butt, and in the brain, which can't conceive a coherent thought because all it knows is the jackhammer jolting of the body and bike to which it is connected.  

But through all the adventures and challenges thrown at them, the women kept up their spirits, recording their daily feelings and trials with a camera and a notebook that eventually was turned into this book. They had plenty of time to consider the world around them as well as their place and purpose in the world. And oh, the descriptions of their observations and musings are wonderous, philosophical, emotional, colorful, and truly insightful.

The night air was cool for July and laced with the sweet breath of poplars and willows that grew in slender wands beside the river. No clean divisions between earth and sky, light and dark, just a lush and total blackness. I couldn't see the mountains but I could sense them around me, sharp curses of rock. The kind of country that consists entirely of edges.

And the places they bicycled. They pedaled and groaned and camped on such locales as:

[the] Tibetan Plateau, that upheaval of rock and ice and sky, but also the Pamir Mountains, where herds of sheep with improbably huge horns dodged avalanches and snow leopards with elegance close to flight. And the Taklamakan, a shifting sands desert dwarfed only by the Gobi and Sahara whose name, according to legend in not literal translation, means 'he who goes in never comes out'....Even more compelling than far-flung mountains and deserts were the stars above and beyond them, distant suns lighting who knows what other worlds.'

I always wonder when reading books such as this which depict exploration, survival, perseverance, and challenges, just how well I might do if faced with the same situations. In the case of Lands of Lost Borders, it is clear I would have given up on the first 15,000-foot climb up a mountain of potholed switchbacks. All the more reason to admire Harris and Mel's fortitude, but only from my cozy chair.

What is the point of exploring if not to reveal our place in the wild scheme of things, or to send a vision of who we are into the universe? A self-portrait and a message in a bottle; maybe no other maps matter....After all, the Latin root of the word explorer is "ex-plorare," with "ex" meaning "go out" and "plorare" meaning "to utter a cry."

Happy reading.

Fred

Other book recommendations
About The First Sentence Reader blog

____________________

If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Beagle, Peter. I See By My Outfit.   

In 1965, two men decide to ride small motor scooters from New York to California (don't ask why). En route, author Beagle describes the people, environment, and culture in a witty, detailed, friendly manner that makes you want to hear every observation he is willing to share.