Neil Peart's Writings

Second Edition
Publicly published by Nimbus Publishing, Ltd., 1996
286 pages, b/w photos
ISBN: paperback - 1895900026

Third Edition
ECW Press, June 2004
260 pages, b/w photos
ISBN: hardback - 1550226673; paperback - 1550226657

"Cycling is a good way to travel anywhere, but especially in Africa. You are independent and mobile, and yet travel at people speed--fast enough to travel on to another town in the cooler morning hours, but slow enough to meet people: the old farmer at the roadside who raises his hand and says, 'You are welcome,' the tireless women who offer a smile to a passing cyclist, the children whose laughter transcends the humblest home."

So begins the text of Neil Peart's extraordinary journal about riding a bicycle on the roads and off the beaten track in West Africa. The Masked Rider is about the bike trek and the people who travel along with the author, including literary sidekicks Aristotle and Vincent Van Gogh. Sometimes it's a story of a tour of hell-Dante on a bicycle-as he suffered the pains of dysentery and stares down the muzzle of a drunk soldier's machine gun. Other times it's a journey of exalted discovery and African adventure of the highest calibre.

"Not only did the music I listened to accompany my journey, but it also took me on sidetrips, through memory and fractals of associations, threads reaching back through my whole life in ways I had forgotten, or had never suspected...Sifting through those decades and those memories, I realized that I wasn’t interested in recounting the facts of my life in purely autobiographical terms, but rather...in trying to unweave the fabric of my life and times. As one who was never much interested in looking back, because always too busy moving forward, I found that once I opened those doors to the past, I became fascinated with the times and their effect on me. The songs and the stories I had taken for granted suddenly had a resonance that had clearly echoed down the corridors of my entire life, and I felt a thrill of recognition, and the sense of a kind of adventure. A travel story, but not so much about places, but about music and memories."

"Somehow, I had imagined the Illustrated Companion would more-or-less assemble itself — Brutus would gather the images; Hugh would select the best of them; my editor Paul McCarthy would choose passages from Roadshow to accompany the pictures; and the publishers (my friends at Rounder Books) would put it all together. Well . . . dream on...In the past few years, while I was involved with all of those other projects, my book publishers became a little over-excited, and started listing the title of the Roadshow Illustrated Companion as if it were already a reality — including it in the 'other books by' column at the front of the paperback edition of Roadshow, and even, apparently, taking advance orders for it. Well, short version — it's probably not going to happen." - Neil Peart, NeilPeart.net, March 2009