Consider this a plug . . .

As you may remember, I received a wonderful holiday gift of David Byrne's Bicycle Diaries.  I finally finished the book yesterday.  Such is the life of a young child's parent, I suppose.

The bulk of the book is a compilation of Byrne's diary-style musings, founded on his adventures in cities around the globe.  As an internationally recognized musician and artist, Byrne has traveled extensively across the Americas, Europe, and Asia.  When he travels, he packs a folding bicycle (such as this one) that he uses as a primary source of getting around his destination cities.  With this mode of transportation as a unifying theme, Byrne's writings delve into a diverse variety of subjects - art, music, politics, sociology, psychology, urban planning.  I described the book to one friend as both "geographically and substantively all over the place."  

While I very much enjoyed the diary aspects of the book and found Byrne's perspectives on his multifarious topics quite interesting, the epilogue continues to resonate in my mind.  In ten pages or so, Byrne managed to capture the essence of modern urban planning theory, a subject that I once spent an entire semester trying to grasp through the writings of the field's well-known theorists, activists, and policymakers.  But even more enlightening was how he found that essence.  Byrne admits that he sort of fell into his perspective and ideology about urban planning; he did not come to it through academic or philosophical study.  Rather, he developed it by living his daily life in urban America.  (New York City, to be exact.)  He's found that the aspects of urban planning that modern thought espouses - mixed use, reasonable densities, and choice in transportation - really do make life engaging and make it interesting to get out of bed everyday and see what's going on outside our doors.  Its a philosophy of incorporation rather than isolation.  It's about puttin' the "social" back in "society," y'all.  

So, in sum, I highly recommend Bicycle Diaries.  Pick it up, or at least go to the bookstore, sit down with a cup of coffee, and read the epilogue.  It will be time well spent.