Cycles of Life

Part travelogue, part memoir, part history.

With wit and self-deprecating humor, Paul Gilje brings the reader along on two bicycle road tours. When Gilje was seventeen, he biked from Brooklyn to Montreal at the end of the summer in 1968. When he was sixty-seven, he repeated (sort of) the trip at the end of the summer of 2018. The first ride marked the transition from adolescence to adulthood; the second ride marked the transition from adulthood (fully employed) to post-adulthood (fully retired).

The journeys took him from his working-class Brooklyn neighborhood, through the steel and concrete canyons of Manhattan, into the majestic Hudson Valley, across the foothills of the Adirondacks, to French-speaking Canada. Gilje recounts his personal odysseys in 1968 and 2018, describing his trials, tribulations and triumphs. Using his training as a historian Gilje draws comparisons between the world around him in each year. Cycles of Life is funny and honest with an oscillating through-line that makes juxtaposing 1968 and 2018 feel fluid and lived, rather than like a static analysis of snapshots in time.