ROWING AGAINST THE CURRENT: On Learning to Scull at Forty - Hardcover

Strauss, Barry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684843218 ISBN 13: 9780684843216

Publisher: Scribner, 1999

Synopsis

A classics professor who fell in love with the sport of rowing during a typical mid-life crisis attempts to show why, with modern, historical, environmental and personal examples, the river calls to him. 12,500 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Barry Strauss, professor of history and classics at Cornell University, is a leading expert on ancient military history. He has written or edited several books, including The Trojan War, The Battle of Salamis, and The Spartacus War.  He lives in Ithaca, New York.

Reviews

To be middle-aged and ghosting a scull through the early morning light of a Lake Cayuga dawn: thats where Strauss finds himself, a pilgrim of sorts, searching for a little self-affirmation. But hes also a junkie, rapt in the glow that pervades the ancient craft of rowing. The sport appealed immediately to Strauss (History and Classics/Cornell; co-author, with Josiah Ober, of The Anatomy of Error: American Military Disasters and Their Lessons for Modern Strategists, 1990). It wasnt just that he needed the workout (bookish, he had long preferred the couch to the gym) or that the oars seemed to speak to him of fluid dynamics and Nile oarsmen and red-brick-and-ivy regattas. Rowing also held the promise of testing the athletic competence and resolve of someone who had fumbled painfully as a child. Redemption seemed to lurk in the boat, a wedding of the cerebral and corporeal. Yet this isnt so much the story of a personal quest. Instead, Strauss revels in the sheer beauty of the sport, from the flow state brought on by the rhythm of perfect oar work to the burnished murk of capacious, ever-so-seedy boathouses. The authors enthusiasm is infectious, buoying the heft of his writing and allowing for an extended investigation into stroke mechanics, a complex, balletic suite of movements. Strauss also makes something well worth reading from the curious blending of elite and common that permeates rowing: it was a poor man's gambit in classical Greece, but an aristocratic pursuit in ancient Rome and pharaonic Egypt; it was a favorite sport of the Gilded Age, complete with race fixing and assorted scandals, and yet the sport also found a following in the mining towns of southern Canada. Redemption is a big word. Still, by any measure, Strauss has tapped into something special out there in his scull. He does fine service to his sport in this memoir. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Around the time I turned forty the unfinished novel manuscript went back in the drawer. I dropped the Buddhist mantra I had been worrying over like a string of beads. What I really wanted besides career and marriage and kids and comfort was, I decided, to learn how to row boats and how to race them: four- and eight-man boats first, then two-man boats, then, finally and preeminently, a single scull. If what followed is a story worth telling, it is a tale not of a champion but of an amateur, whose heart was stirred by boats and whose imagination was lifted by history. The oars gave me power but they also taught me humility.

Edition details

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0684843218
• ISBN 13: 9780684843216
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176