Chasing Lance: The 2005 Tour de France and Lance Armstrong's Ride of a Lifetime (with 20 photos included) Review

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Chasing Lance: The 2005 Tour de France and Lance Armstrong's Ride of a Lifetime (with 20 photos included) ReviewOne expects a respected author like Martin Dugard to cover the sporting event of the 2005 tour thoroughly and interestingly. But the bonus in "Chasing Lance" is Dugard's magnificently reasoned and masterfully written reason why Lance has transcended sport to become an international icon.
One later chapter is great travel writing. Dugard parallels his process of self-discovery of why HE is chasing Lance with a description of his first-time visit to Lourdes. He interweaves his two thought trains so skillfully that when he finishes his tour of the grotto and winds up his personal and painful train of remembrance and reason, I was gifted with a new insight about myself. The chapter brought me through Lance's struggles to not only renew my appreciation for my cancer surviving wife, but also to see my own dreams and struggles, however meager, in both a more realistic light, and at the same time an even brighter one.

At the time of Armstrong's record 7th straight Tour win, I heard a major American TV business news anchor scoff at Armstrong's advertising appeal saying, "Hey, come on, it's BICYCLE racing!" as if no one cares much about it, not like baseball, for instance. But Dugard convinces the reader (like we needed convicing) that the Lance personna is far bigger than the man--and almost everywhere. What Dugard does so well is not only to describe both the race and the phenomenon, but what it is in US that causes us to hold the IDEA of Lance so special.
So far, Lance has published two volumes of autobiography and his mother's memoirs are also available. Beyond these, teammate Michael Barry offers us a look "Inside the Postal Bus" and outdoor writer Daniel Coyle tracks Lance's 2004 season and the genesis of his darker moods in "Lance Armstong's War". Both are easy reads and have much to offer Lance fans, especially fans of bike racing.
"Chasing Lance", however, is the only one that tries to get at what it is about US, making it a multidimensional examination of this the first mega sports legend of the 21st century, and the first time that cancer survivorship has deservedly resulted in fame and reverence as great or greater than any other human accomplishment.Chasing Lance: The 2005 Tour de France and Lance Armstrong's Ride of a Lifetime (with 20 photos included) Overview

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The Hustle: One Team and Ten Lives in Black and White Review

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The Hustle: One Team and Ten Lives in Black and White ReviewI loved it! "The Hustle" is a unique and intelligent book. On one level, it can be read as an intriguing tale about 10 boys - black and white, rich and poor -- who came together at age 14 to play basketball together for a season in Seattle. They won the state championship that year, and then went their separate ways. The book is an effort to find out what happened over the past two decades to these boys - how they grew into men, and whether the team, as an integration experiment, made a difference to each of their lives. The guys themselves are pretty interesting: they include a prosecutor who tried the notorious Green River Killer, a dot-com millionaire-turned hedgefund manager making a killing of Seattle's economic boom, a recovering crack addict, a weed dealer struggling to get out of the trade, a former hustler turned pentacostal minister, and a reclusive wine maker in Oregon. Tragically, one of the star players on the team was brutally murdered, which is a shock that propels the book and makes others on the team ponder their own life chances and luck.
On a deeper level, "The Hustle" can be seen as an exploration of race and class in America over the past 30 years (indeed, longer, as Merlino puts each character in a much larger historical context). Merlino uses the tales of each individual boy on the basketball team -- with all their struggles, their successes, their woes, their joys, their personal histories and families -- to open a window on a different aspect of American life during the past 20 years, all with Seattle as the backdrop: the dotcom boom and the instant millionaires, the crack era and the war on drugs, the challenges of creating a diverse community in elite schools, the struggling public education system, gentrification and its impact, and manhood in a time of economic and cultural uncertainty.
It is at once very personal, and at the same time "big picture" -- looking at the political, economic and cultural changes of the past twenty years, and how this group tries to find and define their own space as men on this shifting canvas. If you are a sports fan or played group sports as a kid, you will relate to the games and the comraderie described in the book. Even if you are not a sports fan (I like sports, but am not a massive fan), the use of the team as a tool to explore larger issues is still highly compelling.
Definitely worth a read.
The Hustle: One Team and Ten Lives in Black and White Overview

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