The 93rd edition of the world’s premier cycling event, Le Tour de France, began last Saturday, July 1. Running until July 23, this year’s Tour will cover 20 stages (including a prologue) and more than 3,600 kilometers until, for the first time since 1999, a rider other than Lance Armstrong will emerge wearing the maillot jaune at the historic finish on the Champs-Élysées in Paris. The Tour sans Lance figures to be an exciting spectacle, all the more since Jan Ulrich of Germany and Tour of Italy champion Ivan Basso, among other top contenders, were disbarred from the race due to drug testing. The scandal leaves the field wide open, and after Friday’s sixth stage American hopefuls George Hincapie and Levi Leipheimer are both in good position for the mountain stages ahead.

We have obviously come a long way in the centuries since the invention of the “mechanical horse,” as David Herlihy masterfully recounts in Bicycle: The History. Now available in paperback, the book, which has been hailed as an “instant classic” (Simon Withers, Cycling Plus), tells the extraordinary history of the bicycle–a history of disputed patents, brilliant inventions, and missed opportunities. The recipient of several prestigious awards, including the 2004 Award for Excellence in the History of Science (Association of American Publishers) and the 2005 Sally Hacker Prize (Society for the History of Technology), Bicycle: The History shows us how this far-reaching invention captured the public’s imagination and the myriad ways in which it has reshaped our world.

“This book is a kind of tour de bicycle and takes the reader along for a great ride, from the early years to the successes of Lance Armstrong,” says Charles Stephen in the Lincoln (Nebraska) Journal-Star.

“A work of real scholarly integrity, towering above most alternatives of the genre,…Bicycle should serve as the standard in years to come,” adds the review in The Ride Magazine.

Read a review of Bicycle which has just appeared in the London Review of Books.