Paul Howard (2)

This is my favorite "outdoor adventure" memoir. Howard details his experience racing in the Tour Divide, a mountain bike race along the Continental Divide that I've wanted to participate in for a long time.

The author is British and has a subtle, dry humor that I really like. He avoids the navel-gazing that so many other "adventure" memoirists participate in, attempting to justify their feats by pretending they're more profound than they are in reality (and probably also trying to justify the retail-prices of their memoirs!).

In any book of this type, there will be a certain monotony to the days described. I don't mind this, because that's just the reality of being on a bike, day in and day out, for a month, but I know there are other readers that won't enjoy it.

There are just a few minor drawbacks that I choose to overlook due to how much I love this book. (It's one of the few books that I own and actually re-read.)

There's a small amount of profanity, one brief reference to the evolutionary theory as fact, and Howard writes some variation of the phrase "[such-and-such] was noticeable only by its absence" at least five times. If you take a while to get through the book, you probably wouldn't notice, but I read it more quickly.

But as I said, this is one of my favorites, so I'd recommend it to anyone who loves cycling - and especially those who've dreamed of going on a long-distance ride themselves.… (mer)

Paul Howard pulls off a remarkable feat in this book—he makes boring the life a five-time Tour de France winner who had an affair with his doctor's wife, married her, had a child by (and an affair for twelve years with) her daughter, and finally broke up his marriage by having an affair with his step-son’s ex-wife who he ultimately married. While the book is full of interesting facts and controversial topics, it fails to be compelling. The reason may be that the author does not do much in the way of finding trends among the facts or of trying to reconcile competing viewpoints of the people he spoke with. Despite the flaws, I would recommend this book to anyone curious about a very different era in cycling, the 1960s.… (mer)

A pleasant read about a Yorkshireman taking part in the Tour Divide, an unsupported 2,700-mile race down America's mountainous spine, from Banff in Canada to the Mexico border.The snippets of history were interesting and the descriptions of the scenery were well done: it becomes clear from reading this account that the damage caused by mineral extraction to the lands of the US is quite breathtaking. Paul Howard doesn't harp on about it at all; he just describes the physical effects on the landscape.Sometimes I found his prose a bit laboured, but overall I was deeply impressed by the effort involved in such an undertaking and interested to read about the lands and communities the riders encountered.… (mer)