Title: Life In The Slipstream: The Legend Of Bobby Walthour Sr
Author: Andrew M Homan
Publisher: Potomac Books
Year: 2011
Pages: 241
Order: Potomac Books
What it is: A biography of an American double-World Champion who made his name racing in the slipstream of motor-pacers and on the Six Day circuit.
Strengths: Excellently researched and a fascinating story about an era in cycling's history when the sport was all about speed.
Weaknesses: The more you learn about this era of cycling - not just in the US, but also in Europe - the more you want to know.

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Title: The Unknown Tour de France: The Many Faces of the World's Greatest Bike Race
Author: Les Woodland
Publisher: Van der Plas Publishing / Cycle Publishing
Year: 2002 (updated 2009)
Pages: 152
Order: Cycle Publishing
What it is: A history, of sorts, of the Tour de France, stopping off at some of the usual destinations but also exploring areas most other authors have forgotten exist.
Strengths: It's a fun and enjoyable read that's well presented and looks nice.
Weaknesses: So much history, so little space.

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Belgian Hammer author Daniel Lee pops into the Café for a chat about Belgium, nurturing talent and the next generation of American cyclists.

* * * * *

Podium Café: Let's begin this with a bit about you. You're a reporter who's been there, done that and worn the jersey. Tell us a little bit about how you got into cycling and came to do your own stint in Belgium.

Daniel Lee: I graduated from high school in 1987, so my teenage years were a great time for US cycling with the 1984 US Olympic team, Team 7-Eleven and Greg LeMond all making history. I always loved riding my bike and around my junior year discovered that cycling was not just an activity but was also a competitive sport.

One summer a good friend and I rode our bikes from our homes in suburban Pittsburgh northeast to my grandparent's house to Bradford, Pa, which is almost to the New York state border. I was wearing cut-off sweatpants, a t-shirt and bulky helmet and riding a Schwinn World Sport. It was a two-day, 188 mile journey with just the two of us pedaling across rural and hilly Western Pennsylvania roads. Our parents were worried but realized it was a very important challenge for us as teenagers. That trip remains my favorite high school memory and really helped spark my interest in cycling and eventually racing.

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Title: One Way Road: The Autobiography Of Robbie McEwen, Three Time Tour De France Green Jersey Winner
Author: Robbie McEwen (with Edward Pickering)
Publisher: Ebury Press
Year: 2011
Pages: 339
Order: Random House
What it is: What it says on the tin: the autobiography of Australia's green jersey hero, Robbie McEwen.
Strengths: McEwen has a way of telling his story that makes you want to listen to him and he effortlessly takes you inside the peloton in a way few other cycling books really manage.
Weaknesses: While McEwen talks about deals - and (briefly) doping - you get the feeling that you're not getting the full, unvarnished story.

"Bike racing's just a hobby I happen to be very good at. It's not a matter of life and death."
Robbie McEwen

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Title: Inside The Peloton: My Life As A Professional Cyclist
Author: Nicolas Roche (with Gerard Cromwell, foreword by Sean Kelly, afterword by Bradley Wiggins)
Publisher: Transworld Ireland
Year: 2011
Pages: 394
Order: Random House
What it is: A collection of Nicolas Roche's Grand Tour newspaper diaries, padded out with extra biographical detail.
Strengths: Fans of Roche will love it.
Weaknesses: It's a pretty bland ride through Roche's life and cycling career.

If cycling were a popularity contest, Nicolas Roche would be a winner. Like his father before him, the man knows how to be the media's friend and a fans' favourite. Through his Grand Tour diary columns in Irish newspapers he hasn't just eclipsed his fellow Irish pros - Philip Deignan (Vuelta a España stage winner, 2009), Daniel Martin (Vuelta a España stage winner 2011) and Matt Brammeier - he has all but nullified their presence in the peloton to the point that casual sports fans in Ireland (and general sports editors in the Irish media ) seem to assume there is just one cyclist flying the flag for Irish cycling.

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Title: Inside The Peloton: Riding Winning & Losing The Tour De France
Author: Graeme Fife
Publisher: Mainstream Publishing
Year: 2001
Pages: 220
Order: Random House
What it is: Graeme Fife's cycling heroes.
Strengths: Guimard. Hinault. Yates.
Weaknesses: It's all dreadfully Anglo-centric.

Inside The Peloton is Graeme Fife's thank you to his cycling heroes, the men whose "riding provided the first inspiration, their readiness to talk to me the continuing stimulus, their generosity the example to make [Inside The Peloton] as good a book as I possibly could." Fife's heroes here are Chris Boardman, Cyrille Guimard, Barry Hoban, Bernard Hinault, Charlie Holland, Sean Kelly, Phil Liggett, Albert Londres, Eddy Merckx, David Millar, Fréderick Moncassin, Raymond Poulidor, Brian Robinson, Paul Sherwen, Bernard Thévenet and Sean Yates. Along the way, many other riders step sideways into the story, Fife often telling the story of one man by comparing and contrasting him with someone else (so, for example, the chapter about Raymond Poulidor is also about Jacques Anquetil).

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Coming to the Cafe Bookshelf in 2012 ... the backlog of 2011 releases, which include: Ross E Goldstein's cycling novel, Chain Reaction; Andrew M Homan's biography of Bobby Walthour Snr, Life In The Slipstream; the autobiography of former British pro Steve Joughin, Pocket Rocket; Robbie McEwen's autobiography, One Way Road; Nicolas Roche's autobiography, Inside The Peloton; and Team Type 1-founder Phil Southerland's autobiography, Not Dead Yet.

That's the backlog and hopefully we'll be through it and out the other side by the time the season-proper starts. By which time 2012's crop of cycling books should have started hitting the shelves. Let's have a look at some of the titles that are currently scheduled for 2012 release.

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The cycling season is over, the year is coming to a close and it's time to pile on the pounds that you'll spend the first three months of 2012 trying to ride off. It's also time to look back at the year that was. So what kind of year has it been on the Café Bookshelf then? Busy is probably the best way to describe it, with a slew of new cycling books hitting the shelves over the course of the year. More books than the Café Bookshelf has been able to keep up with.

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In part two of our interview with Rob Arnold attention turns to Australian cycling, sprinting through the years of ‘Oppy' and Mockridge, racing past Peiper and Anderson and looking at the role played in recent years by the Australian Institute of Sport and Heiko Salzwedel. We look forward to London 2012, when Australian and British cycling will once again go head to head. We also talk about Robbie McEwen and Cadel Evans. We close by looking forward to the future of Australian cycling.

Podium Café: Let's go back to 1998, when you first started publishing RIDE Cycling Review. Australian cycling at this stage was getting pretty organised I guess, but this would have been more on the track and off-road.

Rob Arnold: Track was the big thing when I started following cycling. Road racing has always been part of the scene here in Australia but it's really blossomed in the years that I've been involved. For various reasons the increase in interest has been steady.

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Back at the beginning of August I reviewed the Cadel Evans biography, Close To Flying, first published in 2009 and now reissued on the back of the Australian's Tour win. To say I didn't like it would be an understatement. To say that I was cruel to its credited author, Rob Arnold, would be a gross understatement.

There then followed - with a bit of midwifery from the INRNG blog and a few others - an exchange of emails between myself and Arnold. We each defended our respective positions. Robustly. Rather than leaving things there Arnold agreed to an interview. We could have spent the whole interview arguing about what was wrong with my review and what was wrong with Close To Flying. But that would be like watching two bald men arguing over a comb. Fun but not very edifying.

The interview that resulted is published in two parts. It is, I hope, fun and edifying. In the first part, we talk about Arnold's early life as a BMX bandit before turning to the topic of publishing: in Australia, Arnold is the publisher and editor of RIDE Cycling Review. He's also the man behind the words on LeTour.fr's live ticker and here shines a light on how the words we read at Tour time get to our screens. Naturally, me being me, we also talk about doping.

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Title: Mountain High: Europe's Greatest Cycle Climbs
Author: Daniel Friebe (photography by Pete Goding)
Publisher: Quercus
Year: 2011
Pages: 224
Order: Quercus
What it is: A look at fifty European climbs, in words and pictures.
Strengths: Beautifully produced with stunning photography, informative graphics and entertaining text.
Weaknesses: It's fifty climbs - which inevitably means that some of the inclusions and exclusions will irk some.

"The Spanish journalist Juanfran de la Cruz observed a few years ago that, like all sports, cycling has many myths and legends, but also the peculiarity that some are made of flesh and bone and others of tarmac road."
Daniel Friebe, Mountain High

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Title: Shay Elliott: The Life And Death Of Ireland's First Yellow Jersey
Author: Graham Healy with Richard Allchin (forewords by Sean Kelly and Pat McQuaid)
Publisher: Mousehold Press
Pages: 193
Year: 2011
Order: Mousehold Press
What it is: Before the Foreign Legion there was the era of the pioneers. Among their ranks was Ireland's Séamus 'Shay' Elliott: the first rider from the English-speaking nations to win stages in all three Grand Tours; the first to make the podium in a Grand Tour; and the first to win an important one-day race, the Omloop Het Volk. This is his story.
Strengths: While Elliott's tale was picked up during the Kelly-Roche era, up to now a lot of it has been told confusingly. Much of it has been left untold. This is a pretty comprehensive fact-based telling of the tale.
Weaknesses: At times there's an almost cold, matter of fact feel to the story, constantly pushing forward when sometimes you might want it to linger longer on certain races and events.

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Title: The Belgian Hammer - Forging Young Americans Into Professional Cyclists
Author: Daniel Lee (foreword by George Hincapie)
Publisher: Breakaway Books
Year: 2011
Pages: 208
Order: Breakaway Books
What it is: The story of the young Americans, the next generation of US cyclists, men and women. Not so much the story of who they are, more of how they're transitioning from riding domestic US races to picking up the culture of the European cycling scene.
Strengths: Good, solid, well written reportage that tries to understand an explain where the next generation of American cyclists - men and women - will come from, and along the way asks questions as to whther this is really how things should be done
Weaknesses: It's an American book for an American audience and Lee's exclusive focus on America and Americans does mean the book is only telling part of the story. There are lessons Lee could have drawn from how other nations do things, and in doing so expanded his focus. And, in the long run, his audience.

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Title: The Happiness Of Pursuit - A Father's Courage, a Son's Love and Life's Steepest Climb
Author: Davis Phinney (with Austin Murphy)
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Year: 2011
Pages: 227
Order: Houghton Mifflin
What it is: A biography of Davis Phinney - husband of Connie Carpenter, father of Taylor Phinney and a pretty cool guy in his own right.
Strengths: Deeply personal and refreshingly candid. It's a book that can make you smile and cry within a couple of pages.
Weaknesses: Made me realise that I really, really want to see Connie Carpenter's story told some day.

So there's this guy, right. Successful bike rider. Great wife. Cool kids. Probably has a wonderful house and all those other things in the Talking Heads song too. And he's making the break into the world of TV. Then. one day when he's doing a rider interview, everyone starts noticing that his hand, holding the microphone, is shaking. Fuck, he must nervous. Fuck, he must be cold. Fuck, he must have been knocking back the caffeine. Whatever it is, it ain't nice to look at. There's something disconcerting about watching people shake uncontrollably.

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Andrew Tilin - The Doper Next Door - pops into the Café for a chat about his year as a citizen doper. Along the way we also talk about the 'anti-aging' industry, Joe Papp, whether doping is tax deductable and the general state of sport today.

Podium Café: Let's introduce you to people who don't know you and haven't read the book review yet. Forty-something. Married. Kids. Expat West Coaster now living in Texas. Freelance journalist, ex of Outside magazine. Long-time amateur-level cyclist. And you have a cat. Did I miss much?

Andrew Tilin: As an aging jock and a writer, you've hit some of the big notes.

I rode my bike across Europe the summer that Greg LeMond won his first Tour (1986), and every time I'd cross a border and show my American passport the guard would make some reference to LeMond. We were almost bros! What a glorious time to hook up with the sport!

As for me being human, which is a big part of Doper: I am often but a domestique in the home of my kids and wife. Been talking to the same therapist for a couple decades (phoners these days). My father came out of the closet when I was a teen, and then died of AIDS before I was 25. My mom acted young until she died too, also too young. Obviously some nicks in my Jew-boy armor, and then I go and decide to play Woody Allen meets Marco Pantani for this book. A little meshuggana, no?

I have a chihuahua, as well, but he's no Taco Bell type. As thick as a Texas football. Pablo. Good guy. I mean, good guy dog.

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Title: The Doper Next Door: My Strange And Scandalous Year On Performance Enhancing Drugs
Author: Andrew Tilin
Publisher: Counterpoint
Year: 2011
Pages: 371
Order: Counterpoint Press
What it is: The story of a Joe Schmoe who spent a year doping, partly for performance enhancing purposes on the saddle, partly in an attempt to turn back the clock and be young again.
Strengths: There's much more to Doper than the usual story of PED-abuse. The book is also about our modern age's obsession with holding back the years and turning back the clock to a youth we never had.
Weaknesses: The other part of the story is obviously the personal one, turning Doper into part memoir. Not everyone cares for memoirs.

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Title: Italian Racing Bicycles: The People, The Products, The Passion
Author: Guido P Rubino (translated by Jay Hyams)
Publisher: VeloPress
Year: 2011
Pages: 175
Order: VeloPress
What it is: A brisk ride through the history and the highlights of 40 historic Italian bike brands.
Strengths: As well as the obvious - Campag, Colnago, Columbus - Rubino also finds time for some lesser known brands.
Weaknesses: The usual issue with books of this sort: so much to say, so little space to say it in.

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The great Café Bookshelf book giveaway goes on. This year we've already given away copies of Cyclopedia, How I Won the Yellow Jumper, Slaying the Badger, Sky's the Limit, We Might As Well Win and Wide-Eyed and Legless. Now you get a chance to win Les Woodland's Cycling Heroes (note: you get to win the book, not the actual heroes - sorry, but the postage on sending Woodland's eighteen heroes to you would bankrupt us. And some of Woodland's heroes might object, even if we offered to send them FedEx).

Woodland's book was reviewed last week - read the review here - and there'll be an interview with the author sometime over the off season. The book is a collection of interviews with, or stories about, some of the men (and two of the women) who inspired Woodland back in the days before Phil Liggett, Channel 4 and the internet came along. Originally released in the early nineties Cycling Heroes has been updated for the new millennium with a few additional interviews that didn't make the cut first time around. Even if you caught it first time round, it's worth looking out for in its updated format.

Bill McGann (himself the subject of an interview that'll appear over the course of the off season) of McGann Publishing (the people behind The Story of the Giro d'Italia and other books) has kindly offered Podium Café readers the chance to win a copy of Woodland's book. Chapeau Chairman Bill.

So what do you got to do to get your hands on the book? Simple: comment below or send a tweet using the hash-tag #PdCCyclingHeroesComp (tweeting your entry helps us plug the site, so do tweet. With all the end-of-year award thingeys going on around the interweb, plugging the site helps). Simple as that really.

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Title: It's All About The Bike: The Pursuit Of Happiness On Two Wheels
Author: Robert Penn
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 2010
Pages: 199
Order: Penguin Books
What it is: One man's quest for the ultimate bicycle wrapped around a potted history of the bike.
Strengths: Entertainingly told.
Weaknesses: Could have done with a picture of the finished beast.

Having considered the pornography of Michael Embacher's Cyclepedia, let's turn this time around to the erotica of Robert Penn's It's All About The Bike as I continue my quest to see if I can't understand what it is that fires the fuse of so many others when it comes to the mechanical aspects of the not so humble bicycle.

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Title: Cycling Heroes: The Golden Years
Author: Les Woodland
Publisher:McGann Publishing
Year: 1994 (updated 2011)
Pages: 166
Order: Bike Race Info
What it is: One man, a tape-recorder and a dozen-and-a-half interviews with, or stories about, some stars from a bye-gone age.
Strengths: You get the story straight from the horse's mouth, the men - and two women - who were there, inside the peloton. No matter how much the sport changes, the most important voices come from within the peloton.
Weaknesses: The sport then and the sport now seem so different that, I'm sure, some will question why such voices from the past need to be resurrected.

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Title: Cyclepedia: A Tour of Iconic Bicycle Designs
Author: Michael Embacher (with Michael Zappe and Martin Strubreiter; photography by Bernhard Angerer, foreword by Paul Smith, translated by Roderic O'Donovan / Brainstorm)
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Year: 2011
Pages: 224
Order: Thames & Hudson
What it is: A lavishly illustrated and beautifully produced peek into the world of bicycle design.
Strengths: Pictures speak louder than words and Cyclepedia is packed brimfull of some beautiful pics.
Weaknesses: It's a quirky selection of bikes, sometimes a bit all over the house as it jumps from this to that with the joining thread simply being that bikes are cool.

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Seeing as last week's competition went down so well and I'm feelng a little bit too lazy to finish off the review I was working on, time for another competition.

This time out we've teamed up with our friends in Mainstream, the UK publisher's of Johan Bruyneel's We Might As Well Win (now available in paperback). The book, as you know by now, is something between Sun Tzu and Who Moved My Cheese. Or, more simply, the motivational, planning and administrative secrets of Johan Bruyneel. If you didn't know that, read the review (and check out the interview with Bruyneel's ghost, Bill Strickland).

So what you gotta do to win We Might As Well Win? Nothing. Well, nearly nothing. Simply comment below (or send a Tweet using the hash-tag #PdCBruyneelComp) and your name will go into Serendiptity's hat. Once your name's in the hat … it could be you (but remember: if you're not in, you can’t win).

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To mark the US publication of William Fotheringham's Cyclopedia, Podium Cafe has teamed up with the US publishers, Chicago Review Press, to give you a chance to win your own copy of a very cool cycling book.

If you missed the book on its UK publication (Vintage/Yellow Jersey Press) last year, you'll find our review of the book here. You'll no doubt already know that Cyclopedia is a compendium of cycling facts, factoids and trivia, put together by the Guardian's chief cycling correspondent.

So, what do you have to do to get your mits on a free copy?

With the cycling season drawing to a close and the Giro di Lombardia taking place at the weekend, we've plumped for a Lombarda-themed competition. All you have to do is tell us who is going to win the race of the fallng leaves. Couldn't be easier, could it?

As a tie-breaker, you'll need to tell us who other the two podium-fillers will be. If you can't already rattle off the race's roster off the top of your head, check out SteepHill.TV

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The Bicycle Book author Bella Bathurst pops into the Cafe to talk about bikes, books and the darkness at the heart of cycling.

* * * * *

PdC: When did you get into life on two wheels and what keeps you rolling?

Bella Bathurst: We all cycled when we were young, but the trouble with cycling in Lanarkshire was that there was nowhere to go.

We could cycle up and down the track, but beyond the gate was the A702, the main trunk road between Edinburgh and Carlisle. Aged seven or eight, the backdraft from the lorries was enough to knock you into the verge.

Now, of course, there's brilliant mountain biking up there - Glentress etc - but there wasn't then.

So it wasn't until about seven or eight years ago in London that I took it up again. I'd always walked everywhere before then.

What keeps me rolling? The sheer joy of it.

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Title: The Bicycle Book
Author: Bella Bathurst
Publisher: HarperPress
Pages: 306
Year: 2011
Order: HarperCollins
What it is: A miscellany of cycling stories for fans of the two-wheeled form of transport.
Strengths: Wonderfully written and some great stories in it.
Weaknesses: It's scary sometimes to see how others perceive cycling.

Bella Bathurst's The Bicycle Book comes on the back of the resurgent popularity of cycling in the UK, the dividend from the Olympic gold diggers and payback for all the lottery money that has been poured into British Cycling in the pursuit of bangles and baubles at that quadrennial five-ring circus that will be pitching up in London next year. Cycling in the UK today is like Cool Britannia all over again, only with Blur and Damian Hirst being replaced by Team Sky and Chris Hoy. Step outside the summertime's in bloom ...

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Walk into any bookshop and - if they stock any cycling books - you'll find a selection of titles telling the history of the Tour de France. This year, the Giro d'Italia became the star of three different books telling its history. But the runt of the Grand Tour litter ... well the poor little Vuelta a España is somewhat neglected, except for one attempt to tell its history: Viva La Vuelta! Having reviewed the book back in January - and then borrowed somewhat from it for The Basque Issue and Dirty Deals Done Dirt Cheap - I took the opportunity to put a few questions to its authors - Lucy Fallon and Adrian Bell.

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This started festering on my desktop sometime over the winter, when I realised that a lot of the cycling books I'd read had made passing reference to the critérium circuit but I'd never really got around to understanding that circuit very well. I had the usual view: crits were a good night out but hardly competitive. But did that mean they weren't important? So I started putting together notes and quotes. Finally I thought I'd better get it off my puter as it just kept growing. So here it is. Apps for the length. Print it and read bits during the duller parts of the Vuelta. If nothing else, it's food for thought.

Behind the Tour de France there used to be a Shadow Tour. One that took place in the weeks after the Tour itself ended but received only a fraction of the Tour's coverage. The post-Tour critérium circuit.

Riders tore around France in the Tour in July and then they tore around France, Belgium and the Netherlands again in August - with occasional trips to the fringe countries, if the money was inviting enough - clocking up as many critériums as they could. Here one day, there the next, speeding (yes, in that sense too) from this village to that, driving overnight and through the day. And at the end of each drive a critérium to be raced. In many ways, this Shadow Tour demanded a lot more of its participants than the Tour de France itself did.

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Title: Need For The Bike
Author: Paul Fournel (trans by Allan Stoekl)
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Year: 2001 (trans 2003)
Pages: 150
Order: University of Nebraska Press
What it is: A series of autobiographical and observational essays that collectively capture some of the magic and charm of cycling.
Strengths: Fournel writes with a poetic compactness and a wry, light touch about topics that make perfect sense to most cyclists.
Weaknesses: Brevity.

While I'm trying to work out what I'm supposed to say about Paul Fournel's Need For The Bike here's a bit from Allan Stoekl, in his translator's introduction:

"Paul Fournel's Need For The Bike is like no other work on cycling that I know. It's not a technical manual, not a hagiography of a few racers. The focus is not on the machinery nor on heroes whose very virtue is that they cannot be emulated. Instead Fournel presents a world, a very personal one, whose axis is the bicycle. It's a world of communication, of connection, where all people and things pass by way of the bike."

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