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Mind Over Water: Lessons on Life from the Art of Rowing | 
 enlarge | Author: Craig Lambert
Publisher: Mariner Books
Category: Book
List Price: $12.95
Buy Used: $0.99
You Save: $11.96 (92%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  24 reviews
Sales Rank: 66588
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 192
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.4 x 0.5
ISBN: 0618001840
Dewey Decimal Number: 796.123092
UPC: 046442001847
EAN: 9780618001842
ASIN: 0618001840
Publication Date: September 7, 1999
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Standard used condition.
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Amazon.com Review
Some sports--the solitary ones, in particular--are simply more prone to mysticism and mystery than others. Golf, certainly. Long-distance running, of course. Fishing. Climbing. Each has a literature that confronts the essence of its lonely pursuit and explores the way the solitude and self-discipline these sports demand grow the spirit and fill the competitor. Lambert's graceful reflection on rowing is a lovely addition to the genre, part memoir, part narrative, part celebration of a relatively arcane endeavor, and utterly provocative. The superficial journey here is over water; the real one is internal. "Like Einstein," he writes, "we wish to know God's thoughts. We shall attempt to pry them loose with an oar. The raw elements of the sport are our teacher: the wind and the water, the boat and its oars, our own bodies and minds." Given those elements, it's no surprise that the education is a profound one. The surprise is how accessible and appealing it turns out to be. --Jeff Silverman
Product Description
In this wise and thrilling book, Criag Lambert turns rowing--personal discipline, modern Olympic sport, grand collegiate tradition--into a metaphor for a vigorous and satisfying life.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 19 more reviews...
 LAME! February 1, 2008
Over the top and over writen! I couldn't read more than half of it. I'll never get those hours back!
I know I never want him in my boat, if he talks the way he writes!
 not for athlete April 17, 2007
This will be a short review. To use an example visit the sample extract that is offered on this web site. The author mentions a double head. He builds it up as something mythic and impossible. This is a joke. Six miles is nothing. Just nothing. Its a warm up for some. Sports writing is not easy but effort should be made to represent the true hardships of a sport, because if you fake it you also fake the joy that can be derived from the sport. Rowing is tough and you learn a lot about yourself from it but limiting it to oh its really cold in the morning and the hagiographies of US olympians is boring and misguided. I suggest Lambert visit a few more boat clubs.
 I'm buying six copies September 4, 2006
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I generally read fiction for entertainment. And, in fact, generally loathe books anywhere in a stone's throw radius of the personal development genre. However, Mind Over Water really touched me. Lambert's insights are packaged in such a way that they both are easily absobed and entertaining. I'm buying a copy for each of my closest friends with the suggestion that they read it once per year, about 5 pages at a sitting.
Gaack! Just when I'd given up highlighting my books. . . January 31, 2005
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
"Mind Over Water" falls into the category of the memoir, highly personal and considered memories and musings. It's about rowing and, as the subtitle states: "Lessons on Life from the Art of Rowing." If you don't like this kind of book, steer clear. You also won't like "Green Thoughts: A Writer in The Garden." On the other hand, if you do like this kind of book, "Green Thoughts" is also recommended.
"Mind over Water" is about rowing internalized, what it means to row and race and how these lessons can be applied to life. As such, its primary goal is not so much instruction as translation. And translations, of course, are never exact, which may account for some of the animosity of other reviewers.
So what is "Mind Over Water" really about? It's not so much about rowing as it is about what rowing means to the author. As such, you can't really fault it for not being the book you might write about rowing or for not being an instruction manual. It has humbler ambitions. Think of it as an off-water musing.
In any case, I liked it. And, yes, I had to get to get out the highlighter. Among those who like the book, everyone is going to have favorite passages, as some of these reviews attest. Here are some of mine:
"Edges form outlines. If our boundaries determine our identities, then we learn who we are by finding our limits."
"Sliding between dark and shadow, between sunlight and the obscure, is the region of discovery."
"Staying on course limits your attention to the boat and its rowers, who are, after all, the motor that takes you there. The goal does not disclose itself until it is attained."
"Mistakes shine a spotlight on our model of reality and show us its flaws. Unexpected outcomes help us refine our picture of nature."
"Tall smokestacks rise from the powerhouse and waft plumes of smoke into the sky, the epitaph of fuel burned into power."
If this kind of writing disturbs or bores you, look elsewhere. If not, you might find "Mind Over Water" as enjoyable as I did.
as much about self-discovery as about rowing September 25, 2004
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
A book that aspires to describe perfection better start with a sentence that aspires to perfection.
This is how Mind Over Water begins: "In the darkness, deep in silence, the lights --- green, red, a few of white --- surge ahead, in the rhythm of breathing."
If this were a class, Butler could riff for 10 minutes on that line. For now, let's leave it at this: You're in a long, narrow boat, with a skin that's just one-sixteenth of an inch thick and oars that extend fifteen feet. It's 5:45 a.m. on an October morning in Boston. It's chilly. And you are about to begin a race that is the equivalent of climbing Mt. Everest. On a Tuesday morning. Before work. Just for fun.
Okay, Craig Lambert, a veteran oarsman and a stylish writer, is a little bit crazy. Well, so are the best rowers. And so is Harry Parker, the Harvard crew coach whose exploits first got Lambert, a gifted amateur, interested in writing professionally about the sport.
You never heard of Harry Parker? He'd be thrilled. Recognition is the least thing he cares about. He's single-minded about something else: winning. And win he does. He became Harvard's crew coach in 1963, when he was just 27. For the next 6 years, Harvard did not lose a single intercollegiate race. His crews won 18 consecutive races against Yale. His winning percentage from 1963 to 1997 is .806 --- he is, very probably, the most successful coach in any sport in the whole and entire world.
Harry Parker has some voodoo wisdom that Craig Lambert has absorbed. And then there are the home truths Lambert's picked up himself along the way. Some samples:
"Speed demands that we risk our balance. Velocity comes with volatility... That which is stable is slow."
"Being part of a crew makes the individual shine; in rowing you pull harder and longer that you could ever alone because everyone else in the boat is depending on you."
"My years of rowing in eights [eight-man boats] convinced me that to succeed in this world we must be willing to do whatever is required despite what our mind says."
"Sometimes the best response to stormy weather is to unleash your own tempest. It is one way to restore equilibrium."
"Grabbing an early lead costs energy, an expense that may later haunt the front-runner... In practice, Parker would remind his rowers that when opponents jump out in front, you must make them pay the price."
"To build a winning crew, select the right athletes, place them in the proper seats, and allow for the freedom to create. In other words, hire the right people for the right jobs and manage with a long, loose leash."
If you're employed in almost any organization Butler can imagine, he'll bet that last idea is one you'd like to print out and slip under the boss's door. That's light years away from the sport of rowing --- and yet it's not New Age, hippy-dippy sloganeering. What it is, Butler submits, is writing at a level we're not used to seeing very often: prose that yokes close observation of the real world with deep wisdom about the world inside.
"We are out here in the darkness to reveal ourselves, to discover who we are," Lambert writes. "With the oars, we attempt things that we cannot do, we confront that which is beyond our capacities. Mind over water. The shells transport us into the unknown."
It almost makes you want to get out there some early morning and see how far, how fast, how smoothly you could make a boat --- or, really, your life --- go.
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