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This is a well-considered manifesto about the absurdity of allowing bike racing culture to dominate the thinking of the everyday bike rider. I can see how this little book would upset a lot of the high priests and acolytes of the bicycle world, but for the rest of us, it's a good, common-sense guide. Ride in everyday clothes, carbon fiber works for racers but can fail spectacularly and suddenly for everyone else, exercise doesn't help you lose weight, use steady lights instead of blinkers, baskets are a good thing, etc. You won't necessarily agree with everything Petersen says, and that's fine. Take what works for you.

I found this paperback signed by Pratchett at the St. Vinnie's thrift store for $2.50, less my senior discount of 10%.

In the unlikely event you're interested in the hiring practices of the aerospace industry during the early space race, and their relationship to advertising and commercial art, this is the book for you. It is, however, both exhaustive and exhausting, and even the best of the artwork gets a bit dull by about the halfway mark. This isn't helped by the dreary duotone and spot color reproduction on the original ads, which were typically designed to be printed with black and one other color of ink.

The text is mostly statistics and dates, with very little human interest.

Dover edition. Thrifted.

The short chapter on carbs helped me lose 20 lbs.

The author devotes about a third of this book to the 1980s farm crisis and its effects on a Midwest small town, another third to her own personal history, and the remaining third to Dewey the cat and his effect on the citizens of Spencer. Dewey was essentially a therapy cat to the entire depressed community, and he was exceptionally good at his job. I would have liked to read more about that, but I got the feeling there just weren't enough anecdotes to fill an entire book. It was a bit tiring to read a biography that tilted the balance more toward "his times and life" rather than "his life and times."