Pedalling Revolution: How Cyclists are Changing American Cities
By Jeff Mapes
Oregon State University Press 2009
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Oregon’s contribution to the national conversation on biking is substantial, and now Portland journalist Jeff Mapes’ Pedalling Revolution: How Cyclists are Changing American Cities provides a thorough exploration of how life on two wheels is transforming the entire United States. Punctuated by personal anecdotes of the writer’s own conversion from driving schlub to fit biking commuter, the book is a must-read for anyone who believes in liveable, bikeable cities and in the real, far-reaching societal benefits of the two-wheeled revolution.
A longtime political reporter for The Oregonian, Mapes sees cycling as more than just a lifestyle choice—he views it as a political act that is a living, daily expression of peoples’ ideals for community, environmental responsibility, personal health, and family values. With Portland as his American what-if and Amsterdam as his ideal, Mapes profiles a movement whose roots stretch back much further than the current economic downturn.
A resident of the country’s most established and influential biking city, Mapes deftly chronicles downtown Stumptown’s slow transformation into a place where bikes and cars compete for space. But the real surprise here is seeing the places where biking is finding its groove, places where you would expect biking to remain more on the fringe—like New York City, where thousands are ditching their Metro cards to get where they’re going. It is in these sections that Mapes captures biking culture’s quick rise on the national agenda.
Mapes’ book will attract the already-converted, but it is also rich with facts and stories showing a country where bicyclists and policymakers work hand-in-hand to solve some of the most pressing issues of the day by encouraging biking. Written in sober prose and overflowing with information, Pedalling Revolution is fuel for biking’s political fire, a well-timed tour de force.
The Local News
By Miriam Gershow
Spiegel & Grau 2010 Trade Paperback Edition
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Eugene author Miriam Gershow’s debut novel, The Local News, fictionalizes a child-abduction story in a way that is both fresh and troubling. On the surface, the book could read like any number of popular television crime shows: a local high school boy goes missing, a detective is called in to search for clues, a community rallies around the missing boy’s family. And the local news plays out the drama in 30-second sound bites that dramatize the event and somehow make light of it at the same time.
But beneath this simple thriller plot is something far more insidious and fascinating—Lydia, a brilliant young girl who isn’t exactly upset that her brother has disappeared. “Going missing, I wanted to yell from some deep, dark pit in the middle of me, was the only interesting thing my brother had ever done,” Lydia says.
From this very last sentence of the book’s first chapter, it is clear that Gershow’s interest lies in the very thing that literature does better than any other art form: unfolding the inner lives of characters against the backdrop of events. As Lydia navigates the treachery of high school while being thrust into the spotlight as a spectacle of grief, her voice becomes sharper, more urgent, both meaner and more vulnerable.
Lydia isn’t always a likeable character—but that’s exactly the point. This gripping novel asks powerful questions about how news reports mythologize people into heroes and turn real tragedy into the stuff of theater. To the community, Lydia is an object of pity who is doted upon. To the reader, she becomes something else entirely.
In the end, this very smart book becomes something else, too: a compelling antidote to the oversimplified drama of a local news clip.
The Goddess Shift: Women Leading for a Change Edited by Stephanie Marohn
Elite Books 2010
The Goddess Shift: Women Leading for a Change is an inspiring, surprising, and often illuminating collection of essays by women leaders who are creating change in all walks of life. With a lengthy roster of contributors that includes both well-known women’s voices—Michelle Obama, Suze Orman, Maya Angelou, Oprah Winfrey, and Eve Ensler, just to name a few—and some lesser-known leaders, the book brings together an impressive series of prose pieces that are as personal as they are topical.
The book features a chapter by Eugene-based family practitioner Dr. Pamela Wible, whose groundbreaking community health center offers an alternative to many of health care’s institutional woes. In her essay, Wible chronicles her passage from daughter of one of the country’s first female physicians into an individualistic and openhearted doctor herself, who is deeply troubled by most patients’ experience of health care.
A pioneer of what she calls the Ideal Community Practice model in Oregon, Wible says she has never liked the “orderly, safe, and predictable” life. In 2005, she called upon the Eugene community to share their dreams for an ideal medical clinic. She handed out blank pages and encouraged neighbors, patients, and friends to dream up their ideal practice. This was hardly a pipe dream: Wible built this practice in less than a month, creating a setting where patients have direct access to doctors 24 hours a day and where patients are treated with humanity and love. “The greatest healing takes place when we are willing to transcend artificial boundaries, love freely, and embrace each other’s dreams as our own,” Wible writes, explaining what she learned through the process.
Wible’s contribution fits well in a book that is very much about telling the story of how women’s contributions matter today. Never preachy and always poignant, The Goddess Shift captures how women’s worldviews—their capacities for love and compassion—are transforming the world’s most broken systems.
