Bicycle Diaries

By David Byrne

Bicycle Diaries is an adventure on two wheels conveyed with humor, curiosity, and humanity.

In this wide-ranging memoir, artist/musician and co-founder of the Talking Heads, David Byrne--who has relied on a bike to get around New York City since the early 1980s relates his adventures as he pedals through and engages with some of the world's major cities. Byrne shares his perspective from the bike on a wide range of topics: city planning, matters of the heart, and quality of life. His  urban bicycling has become more popular than ever as climate-conscious city dwellers reinvent basic transportation.

From Buenos Aires to Berlin, he meets a range of people, both famous and ordinary, shares his thoughts on art, fashion, music, globalization, and the ways that many places are becoming more bike-friendly.

David Byrne is a writer, visual artist, and filmmaker. He was a founding member, principal songwriter, lead singer, and guitarist of the American New Wave band, the Talking Heads.

Byrne has released solo recordings and worked with various media, including film, photography, opera, fiction, and non-fiction. He has received an Academy Award, a Grammy, a Special Tony Award, and a Golden Globe. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as part of the Talking Heads.

In 2008, Byrne designed a series of bicycle racks in the form of image outlines corresponding to the areas in which they were located, such as a dollar sign for Wall Street, and an electric guitar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Byrne worked with a manufacturer who constructed the racks in exchange for the right to sell them later as art. The racks remained on the streets for about a year.

Two bike racks constructed from the Byrne Bike Rack Alphabet, a system of modular letter segments that can be combined to form various words, remain installed at The Brooklyn Academy of Music/BAM.

Penguin Books, 2010, softcover, 5.33 x 8 inches, 320 pages.