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.

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.

About this edition

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