In the midst of the standard, dreary midlife crisis -- complete with wine-tasting courses, yoga classes, and a failed attempt at a first novel -- forty-year-old Barry Strauss falls unexpectedly and passionately in love with rowing, a sport in which a twenty-seven-year-old is a has-been.
Strauss, a professor of classics and history, writes about the unanticipated delights of an affair that, like so many others, begins as a casual dalliance and develops into a full-blown obsession. Drawn to the sport in part because of his affinity for Greek antiquity, he develops a love for old boathouses, a longing for rivers at dawn, a thirst to test himself, and, ultimately, a renewed sense of self-reliance -- as someone who had experienced sports humiliation as far back as Little League suddenly finds himself bursting into athleticism at an unlikely age.
From the awe-inspiring feats of the war-bound Greek triremes with their crews of 172 men rowing on three levels to the solitary pride of finishing a first race in which he gets stuck in the weeds and has to be fished out, Barry Strauss shows us why there is nothing -- absolutely nothing -- half as much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.
Rowing Against the Current: On Learning to Scull at Forty (New York)
Brand: Scribner
$20.60 - $28.38
- UPC:
- 9780684863306
- Maximum Purchase:
- 2 units
- Binding:
- Paperback
- Publication Date:
- 2001-04-17
- Release Date:
- 2001-04-17
- Author:
- Barry Strauss
- Language:
- english