Banner Message
Please note: Due to the renovations happening to the Pritzker building, the bookstore is in a temporary location without full access to the inventory. There might be items that appear online that are not currently accesible to us to ship to you. If you order these items, you will be refunded and the rest of your order will ship. Feel free to contact us with any questions.
Health / Wellness
Being a patient is part of being alive. Sooner or later most of us go through it. Disease and serious illness often strike quite randomly, and when they do, we quickly become subject to the impersonal forces of biochemistry and pharmacology. We rarely think about this beforehand and are often totally unprepared for it when it happens. Suddenly there we are, subject to a standard treatment protocol.
Darrel Moellendorf learned this by experience during a month confined to a solitary and sterile hospital room where I received a life-saving stem cell transplant. His room was somebody's workspace, his schedule was somebody's work routine, his immune system was systematically crushed, and his prognosis was out of his hands. There was no assurance that it would all work out for the best.
Having spent 30 years teaching philosophy to college students, He was facing the biggest test of all, perhaps the final exam. These are his reflections before, during and after treatment, written in real-time. In his words, 'my brain was sometimes addled by the chemotherapy that sapped my energy and destroyed my immune system, but I wrote out of the conviction that living well includes living well with disease, and eventually living well facing death.'
This memoir expresses those convictions along with those that the virtues of patience, courage, trust, and hope serve us well. A measure of good humor also can't hurt.
Robert Penn has saddled up nearly every day of his adult life. He rides to get to work, to bathe in air and sunshine, to travel, to go shopping, and to stay sane. He's no Sunday pedal pusher. So when the time came for a new bike, he decided to pull out all the stops and build his dream machine.
It's All About the Bike follows Penn's journey, but this book is more than the story of his hunt for two-wheeled perfection. En route, Penn brilliantly explores the culture, science, and history of the bicycle. From the United Kingdom to California, via Portland, Milan, and points in between, his trek follows the serpentine path of our love affair with cycling. On the way to building the perfect bike, Robert Penn brilliantly explains why we ride.