The Perfect Vehicle

What Is It About Motorcycles

By: Melissa Holbrook Pierson

Narrated by: Leanne Woodward

"This book, a polished, winding meditation on the theory and fractiousness of motorcycles, celebrates both their eccentric history and the wary pleasures of touring."―The New Yorker

In a book that is "a must for anyone who has loved a motorcycle" (Oliver Sacks), Melissa Pierson captures in vivid, writerly prose the mysterious attractions of motorcycling. She sifts through myth and hyperbole: misrepresentations about danger, about the type of people who ride and why they do so. The Perfect Vehicle is not a mere recitation of facts, nor is it a polemic or apologia. Its vivid historical accounts—the beginnings of the machine, the often hidden tradition of women who ride, the tale of the defiant ones who taunt death on the racetrack—are intertwined with Pierson's own story, which, in itself, shows that although you may think you know what kind of person rides a motorcycle, you probably don't.

©1997 Melissa Holbrook Pierson (P)2024 Spotify Audiobooks

Predictable, drawn out, poor choice of narration.

It is unlikely that a nonmotorcycle rider will wish to hear this book. Therefore, this book should not be written for the novice but the experienced. And we've all heard and experienced everything in the book before. More insight is needed. More intriguing dissection of the matter.

Somewhere the suggestion is made that the car has changed human culture more than the atom bomb. But the author only limits the apparent effect of the atom bomb as detonations over two Japanese cities. Not its effect on the Cold war, or the peaceful uses of the nuclear energy in producing electricity and treating cancer. This is an example of the limited introspection to be found throughout the book.

The narration also suffers. It's not the female voice. It's not the perfect diction. Something about the way the book is read as a cold, passionless script that rubs the wrong way.

Victim Book

could be good if more about bikes and less woe about gender which people I doubt care about