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Title: The Amateurs: The Story of Four Young Men and Their Quest for an Olympic Gold Medal
ISBN: 0449910032
Author:
David Halberstam
Publicate Date: 1996-05-07
Publish: 1996-05-07
List Price: $13.00
Average Customer Rating: 4.5
Format: Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $7.29
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $4.39
Amazon Merchant Price: $10.40
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| Customer Review: |
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1: Disappointed fan of Halberstam
I am a big fan of David Halberstam. Like his other books, this one was well written, but I just could not get into the subject matter. The main characters that he follows were uninteresting and pretty one dimnesional in their rowing obsession. Halberstam seems to worship their dedication to a sport that few care about, but I find their masochistic pleasure in continuous pain and lonely training quite odd and certainly not anything heroic. I think that if I had been a rower at some point in my athletic career instead of a track athlete and soccer player, I would have enjoyed this book more. We've all heard the term "too much inside baseball." For me this book was too much "inside rowing" and did not translate into a broader experience for fans of other sports.
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2: Great writing, sad story
Really well written, but a depressing story. I finished the book without any happy illusions about the sport, or sports in general. Nevertheless, a valuable story about the human spirit.
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3: A way to see into rowing and the people who do it
For someone who's not a rower, Halberstam gets most of this right - the technique, the atmosphere, the obsessiveness (which is common to all levels of rowing, just intensified among Olympians). In some ways the selection for the '84 Olympics was a crux point in the US rowing system, and Halberstam shows just why. If you want to get a view into a sport most people ignore, written by a top author, this is a good place to do it - same if you just want a peek in the mind of world-class athletes. If you want to really learn about the 84' Olympics selection camp, I'd recommend reading this in combination with Brad Lewis' "Assault at Lake Casitas", for a another viewpoint from one of the main actors (and the '84 doubles gold medalist).
Incidentally, the movie Rowing Through was based on The Amateurs. It's quite divergent from the book, but not too bad if you can ignore a good bit of gratuitous sex and some hardly-Olympic-caliber rowing in the scenes on the water.
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4: top 2 rowing books ever
halberstam is very engaging in not merely following the story of the 1976 Olympic US rowing scullers, but in relentlessly digging into their lives for historical details of their rowing past, psychological stabs at what drives them, and their social interaction with their teammates. this book was quite well known in the 1980's, but seems to have been forgotten by many in the rowing community - what a shame!! i expect every serious rower today would still find this an extremely compelling and interesting story, and for those of us who read it 20 years ago, i can testify that it is very well worth a re-read. and the other top rowing book? virtually unknown and quite hard to find, brad alan lewis' `assault on lake casitas' is just as great as `the amateurs', and a fantastic companion to it!!
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5: Another great book from David Halberstam
I read this book in spite of the facts that I have no interest in rowing and know nothing about it. I read it only because it was written by David Halberstam, and I've loved everything I've ever read by him.
This book was no exception. Even though I still know very little about the sport, I now appreciate how grueling it is, and how much training these guys do.
You can't go wrong with a David Halberstam book, and this one's no exception.
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