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 enlarge | Author: Craig Lambert
Publisher: Mariner Books
Category: Book
List Price: $12.95
Buy Used: $2.91
You Save: $10.04 (78%)
New (18) Used (30) from $2.91
Avg. Customer Rating:  24 reviews
Sales Rank: 240500
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: International shipping available
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| Customer Reviews:
 A Wonderful Book For Some March 20, 2004
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I thoroughly enjoyed this book and its musings, although I suspect that much of my appreciation can be explained by my: (1) being about the same age as the author; (2) having rowed occasionally and run daily along the Charles River; (3) having attended Harvard College and having heard much about Harry Parker and some of the Ivy League's great rowers; (4) having read "The Amateurs" and a number of other books on crew; and (5) appreciating good writing, no matter what the topic. Like some, but not all of the other Amazon reviewers, I found Lambert's analogies and life-lessons cogent and reaffirming. If you share any of my propensities, I highly recommend the book!
seductive sports saga October 26, 2003
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
I had fun with this book. As a rower who has been on national teams and medaled at the Olympic Games,I resonated with this saga of rowing and what it means to those who do it. Some sports books I have read take the perspective of the outsider, the spectator. In sharp contrast, this one comes from someone who has really "been there," who has experienced training, racing, winning and losing. This is the real thing. The author extrapolates down-to-earth, practical experiences to worldly, spiritual, and even cosmic insights. Highly recommended.
 Godel, Escher, Bach meets Jonathan Livingston Seagull October 3, 2002
16 out of 18 found this review helpful
I don't know when I've read a more unfortunately flawed book -- unfortunately, because while there are snippets of truly inspired writing in it, they are overwhelmed by too many examples of what Strunk and White have told us all not to do. The author, evidently a successful journalist, seems to lose all sense of restraint in the book-length format: pithiness is absent as points are belabored to death; metaphors are piled three- and four-deep until all sense of the original subject is lost; and a sense of appropriate diction is tossed out the window in favor of florid, show-off vocabulary that causes the reader to wince in sympathetic embarrassment. Perhaps most telling, the author never seems to find an authentic voice. Compelling books on sports have been written from the perspective of both the insider and the outsider; Lambert seems to try for both, and is convincing as neither. He drops the names of rowing greats he has shared the river with, yet never seems to find his own place as a rower, the level at which he can simply put his head down and work at it without concern for what others are doing. Constantly fretting at his own inadequacies and questioning whether he has any right to consider himself a "real athlete", he articulates a series of vague goals that are best summed up as a desire not to be last -- or at least, not last by too much. The result, for the reader, is to end up wondering why Lambert is in this endeavor -- rowing or writing -- and if the author himself doesn't seem to know, why should the reader care?
 Discursive pop philosophy... April 6, 2002
2 out of 6 found this review helpful
Lambert heaps pop philosophy with a shovel in huge, syropy dollops in this discursive essay on the sport of rowing. An amusing book, certainly, good for light reading. Not terribly original and the philosophical ideas lack focus and are not integrated.
An overly cerebral book about a highly visceral sport October 1, 2000
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
Other readers have criticized the author for being self-centered and somewhat uninitiated. In fact, this book is much more a series of intellectual/autobiographical essays than it is a book about rowing. This book is cerebral in exactly the way that rowing is not. In a way, Lambert's approach resembles the overthinking that many rowers have to conquer in order to compete well. As a portrait of the sport, it is mediocre, or worse. As a Montaigne-like series of essays which uses rowing as a metaphor, it succeeds fairly well. My guess is that people who enjoy personal essays will enjoy this book; serious rowers looking for a book about rowing will often find it unsatisfying.
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