The cyclist who went out in the cold

This excellent book is, on the surface, a travelogue documenting a 8558 km bicycle tour from the northern tip of Europe (Norway) to its southeastern extremity at the Black Sea. The route follows the Iron Curtain trail, so named as it skirts the borders of twenty nations divided by the superpowers in recent history. To properly ground his adventure, Moore selects a communist-built shopping bicycle as his steed. This aspect of the book, man vs machine vs the elements (he begins his trip struggling through the Laplander winter), supplemented by photos and tweets from the ride, is fascinating on its own, and certainly inspires this amateur short-distance cyclist to ride farther. But Moore adds considerable depth to his book by providing compelling sketches of the local characters he encounters, the history of the places he pedals through, and humorous anecdotes from his adventures in finding room and board. In this way, the book belongs on the shelf near David Byrne's Bicycle Diaries and Anna Funder's Stasiland, being a more extreme version of the former, and a peripheral complement to the latter. Moore's prose is vivid and fresh, never dull, and imbued with wit and humor, even as he describes situations that would utterly demoralize most folks. Indeed, I believe he did at times fall victim to the trials of his epic ride (such as having to empty his panniers in drenching rain at a Russian border crossing), but the ability to laugh it off, if only eventually, is something we all can take away.