Bicycling For Life covers one man's sixty-five years of bicycling from the early years of the Great Depression to the beginning of the new millennium, from a primitive one-speed to the 24-speed superbikes of today. As Walter Baumann takes a ten-day bike journey from West Los Angeles to Yuma, Arizona and back, he thinks about the major traumas of divorce and stroke he's experienced. But he also remembers pas adventures on a bicycle and by journey's end he has a newly revised life plan -- twenty years later, he is still bicycling and in good health, both physical and mental. Although a superb work of fiction, Bicycling For Life holds a great many truths for the dedicated cyclist and is a pure and unique pleasure to read.

In Stroke! A Memoir, anthropologist Arthur Niehoff shares with the reader a personalized, patient's viewpoint of the healing process, written after he recovered from a stroke. Changes in values, family life, and capabilities are revealed in this first-person memoir.

An understandable and informative look at the thoery of evolution. The author offers an interesting format for readers - alternating between vivid story-based reconstructions of primitive society and question-answer sessions between a virtual professor and student. Once and a while the reading level of the book dropped to a frustrating low level, but all in all I felt it acheived the goal of expressing evolution in a palatable format. It was also refreshingly neutral about race and gender - exploring the roles of all humans in past soceities. A recommended read.

This was an amazingly good book. I had to read it for a college anthropology course. At first I was hesitant but once I began to read it, I found it to be very interesting. It is written like a novel, which I find to be a rather unique approach. I find most Anthropology and History boring because they are written in like a textbook sort of style. They are a bunch of facts written in an uninteresting way. That is the total opposite of this book. I would definately recommend it to anyone.

The author dedicates this book to his ex-wife, not because of his fond memories of her, but because their bitter divorce is the cause this book exists.

Such brief explanation at the prologue, seems to be the backbone of how Mr. Niehoff sees the forces that drive one sex after the other.

Using the format of a novel, (not of a scientific work) he will seek to provide to reader a view of the possible causes that have lead to such dramatic changes of conception of what is the purpose of a family and what are individuals expecting of it, at least from the perspective of the Western Civilization.

He will attempt to make such explanations by seeing from another dimension a "life time video" the lives of its parents, its ex-wives, a date, a cockroach, a chimpanzee and finally his own in order to understand from a detached perspective why we humans dedicate so much time to sex, when the fact is that for more than 99% of the humans takes a very brief time of the life span, when it is compared to other activities such as eating, working, transportation, sleeping etc. So why on earth we dedicate so much energy to think about it? And why is it that the lack of understanding with the members of the opposite sex is such a source of anguish and pain? A genetic drive is not longer a workable explanation because the fact is that we are not desperate to cover the surface of the planet with more fellow citizens. On the contrary having fewer children is now a common trend worldwide.

Nice so far, the problem is that there does not seem to be any real answer, to which the author can always state that this is a novel not a self-help guide.