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The Perfect Vehicle: What It Is About Motorcycles - Hardcover

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9780393040647: The Perfect Vehicle: What It Is About Motorcycles

Synopsis

A motorcyclist in America and Europe for the past ten years sorts out the myths, rituals, and attractions of motorbiking, tracing the history of the vehicle and its riders--especially women--and recounting her own riding life.

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Review

"From my mother I learned to write prompt thank-you notes for a variety of occasions," Melissa Holbrook Pierson writes. "From Mrs. King's ballroom dancing school I learned a proper curtsy and, believe it or not, what to do if presented with nine eating utensils at the same place setting.... From motorcycles I learned practically everything else." Pierson, an intellectual New Yorker, is open to her own contradictions--she is bold and fearful, a motorcycle-crazed poet with a Ph.D., and these seeming incompatibilities are what make this book so good. She can write equally well about the visceral pleasures of riding and about the pains of heartbreak or her own displeasure with her fears.

This is the motorcycle memoir for those who are sick of memoirs--or motorcycles. It is a book for people who don't know what the big deal is about riding, or why the Guggenheim Museum in New York, in a swirl of controversy, would exhibit motorcycles as works of modern art. "Riding on a motorcycle can make you feel joyous, powerful, peaceful, frightened, vulnerable, and back out to happy again," Pierson writes, "perhaps in the same ten miles. It is life compressed, its own answer to the question, 'Why?'" --Maria Dolan

About the Author

Melissa Holbrook Pierson is the author of The Perfect Vehicle, The Place You Love Is Gone, Dark Horses and Black Beauties, and The Man Who Would Stop at Nothing and The Secret History of Kindness. She lives in Shokan, New York.

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  • PublisherW W Norton & Co Inc
  • Publication date1997
  • ISBN 10 039304064X
  • ISBN 13 9780393040647
  • BindingHardcover
  • LanguageEnglish
  • Edition number1
  • Number of pages240
  • Rating
    • 3.93 out of 5 stars
      452 ratings by Goodreads

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