According to David V. Herlihy's encyclopedic Bicycle: The History (2004), the shift from the unstable, solid-tired, high-wheeled bicycle called the “ordinary” to the pneumatic tired, “Rover”-style bicycle with identically sized wheels and a low-mount frame finally delivered “the people's nag” to the people. The advent of the Rover, or “safety,” bicycle in the 1890s not only made more efficient use of the human body for personal transport, it also changed manufacturing, athletics, fashion, and tourism. In addition to enumerating these seismic economic and cultural changes related to the bicycle, Herlihy includes a brief and alluring aside describing two around-the-world bicycling adventures. First, he mentions the successful 1890–93 world tour by Thomas G. Allen Jr. and William Sachtleben. Second, he mentions Frank Lenz, a solo rider who began his tour in 1892, but who, just as he was nearing completion, mysteriously disappeared in central Turkey.

Herlihy devotes his next book, The Lost Cyclist: The Epic Tale of an American Adventurer and His Mysterious Disappearance, to these three adventurous cyclists, or “globe girdlers,” giving special attention to the young accountant from Pittsburgh, Frank Lenz. On the surface, The Lost Cyclist reads like a combination of adventure story and detective novel. The first half of the book, “On the Road,” alternates between Allen's and Sachtleben's eastward world tour and Lenz's racing ambitions and his preparations for a westward course. For example, the beginning chapter of the book describes Lenz's life in Pittsburgh and his rise as a bicycle racer. And in the next chapter, Herlihy details Allen's and Sachtleben's mechanical difficulties in Athens, Greece. This pattern of cutting back and forth between these two narratives provides contextual insights into the rise of the sport of cycling in the US as well as reports of just how shockingly new the bicycle was in many parts of the world. The second half of the book is titled: “The Search,” and in it Herlihy follows Sachtleben, who is sent by Outing magazine to solve the mystery of what happened to Lenz. Instead of providing hindsight and overview, Herlihy follows Sachtleben just as he encountered delay and difficulty: progress is jammed and details withheld, as in a detective novel. While the first half of the book builds anticipation by cutting back and forth between the two world tours, the second half focusses on the popular reception of Frank Lenz's disappearance and government and private efforts to solve the mystery. Each section presents its own narrative attributes that compound the thematic and, especially, cultural relevance of Herlihy's book.

By the time Lenz left New York City and headed west on his journey, he was already a successful bicycle racer astride his high-wheeler. Unhappy with his job as an accountant at a brass-fittings company, he yearned to emulate Thomas Stevens's world tour of 1884–87, and Allen and Sachtleben's successful tour. Lenz cleverly decided that to finance his tour he could sell his journalistic accounts and photographs to one of the many magazines catering to outdoor enthusiasts. With this idea in mind, he modified his camera to take action shots while riding and sold his photo-journalistic travel narratives of his regional tours to local newspapers. One such journal, the American Athlete, recaps his tour to New York by noting, “Lenz recently returned from a three weeks' wheel tour, reports that he made about 150 exposures, photographing scenery of every description … everything that looked at all inviting” (23). Lenz's understanding of the popular press helped him to secure a contract with Outing magazine to supply photographs and reports during his tour, and he set off on 4 June 1893.

Throughout the US, Lenz was greeted with both awe and curiosity: he was part athlete and part circus performer. But both newspaper reports and his own accounts of his travels through Asia reveal a mixture of warm welcomes and fearful responses, and ultimately reveal that he was not flexible enough to adapt to unknown circumstances. While riding through Japan, townspeople and dignitaries treated him kindly, but in China, especially in small villages, he was often pelted with rocks and chased away. Lenz might have avoided these scuffles with the locals, but he would not accept traveling with guides, and he did not take advice well. Early in his tour, one journalist remarked that Lenz “had more sand than sense” (101), and this is evident in his plan to cycle during the rainy season in Southeast Asia. Highlighting Lenz's stubbornness is the pair Allen and Sachtleben, who, as a team, take a slower, more culturally aware itinerary, slowing when advised, accepting escorts, and often staying in one town for many weeks.

Just when Lenz was starting to feel like he might complete his journey, he stumbled into a regional conflict. The three-hundred-mile stretch between Tabriz (present-day Iran) and Erzurum, Turkey, was exceptionally dangerous during the early 1890s, due to the escalating violence between the Kurds and Armenians. By November of 1894, Lenz's letters and photographs back to his mother and to the press had stopped. The prolonged silence created a media frenzy in the US, garnering the attention of President William McKinley and prompting US State Department involvement. Outing magazine was forced to send William Sachtleben to search for Lenz.

Herlihy's shift from bicycle adventure to political intrigue is abrupt. After many months of delay, Sachtleben finally arrives in Turkey, only to be blocked for many weeks from investigating the supposed site of Lenz's disappearance. Ultimately, Herlihy says, the process of solving the mystery was a “colossal failure”: two Armenian captives, who were later thought to be innocent, died before the trial, and the central defendant, named Moostoe, was found guilty four years after the incident; officials believe he moved far away as he was never found again. Lenz's mother was able to collect only a fraction of her son's insurance and indemnity, but not from Outing magazine, his employer. Instead, the source was the Turkish Sultanate, who, “without any formal admission of guilt … discreetly attached the sum to a scheduled payment on a warship under construction in Philadelphia” (284). Herlihy seems particularly careful to include Sachtleben's firsthand written account of the Armenian Massacre, an event that still casts a long shadow in today's geopolitics, and should lead to further scholarly investigations surrounding US involvement. One of the most powerful photographs in The Lost Cyclist was taken by Sachtleben. It reveals a large group of Armenians burying their dead on 31 October 1895, one day after the massacre. The undertow of globalization is implicit here: readers will be rewarded for comparing the small-scale personal tragedies of Lenz, Lenz's mother, and Sachtleben's dashed hopes against the larger forces of technological change, ethnic conflict, and intractable political issues.

The Lost Cyclist is not a scholarly treatise about the disappearance of Lenz, nor is it a monograph about the rise of modern technology. But reading this book, in which cyclists rely upon modern technology for their bikes and ride either next to or on top of railroad beds and underneath telegraph lines, may remind readers of the technological changes outlined in works such as Wolfgang Schivelbusch's The Railway Journey: The Industrialization and Perception of Time and Space (1987) or David E. Nye's The Technological Sublime (1994). Even though The Lost Cyclist relies upon novelistic narrative techniques, it is not like H. G. Wells's Victorian novel The Wheels of Chance (1896), or Tim Krabbe's road-racing classic The Rider (1978). Instead, Herlihy's book is closer to a combination of Allen and Sachtleben's Across Asia on a Bicycle (1894), and Barbara Savage's Miles from Nowhere: A Round the World Bicycle Adventure (1985), with a touch of Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild (1996) and Christopher McDougall's Born to Run (2009). Part of this book's success is its hybrid structure: two tales of around-the-world-tours interleaved with newspaper accounts and excerpts from the riders' own journals. The structure is both barrier to interpretation and this book's strength. Academic readers might become frustrated at the lack of footnotes and the focus on popular newspapers and primary sources such as journals and diaries. Yet the narrative reads with ease, and it serves as a resource for further archival research. The structure allows Herlihy to give Lenz a chance to tell his own story through his journalistic accounts and photographs, and to try to piece together what happened during Lenz's final days and the ensuing and painfully protracted investigation.

Herlihy's book will interest scholars of American studies and the humanities for three reasons. First, he reveals the unevenness of modernity: unprecedented industrial advances such as roads, railroads, and telegraph lines that enable cyclists to cover great distances contrast with fragmented communication, travel delays, and government and individual corruption. Put another way, Herlihy reveals the intersections of modernism, global culture, technology, and tourism by reviving cycling as a nearly forgotten, but at the time hugely popular, cross-cultural meme. Second, the narrative's chief protagonists Sachtleben and Lenz do not appear heroic, but they still carry the story with their mistakes and enthusiasms. They are human, and they help to contextualize the technology and to reveal the importance of cultural awareness when making decisions. Third, this would be an excellent book to teach at either the undergraduate or graduate level. I could imagine constructing a course focussed on turn-of-the-century technology and transportation in which The Lost Cyclist features as one of the markers of nonfiction reportage. In addition, this book is going to form the core text of a course that I am designing on endurance sports and popular contests that traces an arc from the Pony Express to round-the-world tours to ultramarathons.

The Lost Cyclist is more than a book about bicycling around the world. It is a story about a handful of people during the emergence of modern geopolitics, when rapid technological change was converging with rapid communication and mass entertainment. If readers find Herlihy's history a bit messy, that is because the book attempts to portray restless, adventurous people like Lenz and Sachtleben, people who were structured by these emerging forces, but who also performed, as Herlihy says, “extraordinary accomplishments” (302).