Witness the French anthropologist as we have never seen him before. Marc Augé coined the term “non-place” to describe the ubiquitous airports, hotels, and motorways filled with anonymous individuals. In this new book, he casts his anthropologist’s eye on a subject close to his heart: cycling.  With In Praise of the Bicycle, Augé takes us on a two-wheeled ride around our cities and on a personal journey into ourselves. We all remember the thrill of riding a bike for the first time and the joys of cycling. Here he reminds us that these memories are not just personal, but rooted in a time and a place, in a history that is shared with millions of others.

Part memoir, part manifesto, Augé’s book celebrates cycling as a way of reconnecting with the places in which we live, and, ultimately, as a necessary alternative to our disconnected world.

Marc Augé is an anthropologist and the former director of studies at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. His many books include Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity and The Future. He lives in Paris. Teresa Lavender Fagan is a freelance translator living in Chicago.

— Joe Mungo Reed, New York Times Book Review

— Bay Bicyclist