Outstanding: a must for cycling enthusiasts and recommended to lovers and haters of France, general sports fans, or anyone...
An amusing British writer creates a lively swirl of action and observation as he bicycles the route of the 2000 Tour de France.
Six weeks before the official Tour started, 35-year-old Moore (Frost on My Moustache, 2000, etc.) began the 2,256-mile circuit of France that finishes on the Champs-Elysées in Paris. Since 1904, when winner Maurice Garin was disqualified for riding a train, the Tour has a rich history of cheating, a tradition that Moore quickly embraces. He lops off the first 400 miles of the race, then in the Pyrenees circumvents the steep climb called Lourdes-Hautacam and walks up the Col de Marie-Blanc. Satisfaction does come with increased endurance and successful ascents of the Cols de Galibier and Izoard in the Alps. Moore observes a changing France as he rides; small towns are dying, and local cycle clubs ride with a casualness that underlies a national softening. His wife and three noisy kids show up for the Alpine section, offering a contrast to the orderly French families. Moore's expertise on Tour history carries the narrative; from Paul Kimmage's race laundry tips to Bernard Hinault's champagne-filled water bottles, interesting detail abounds. The author gladly plays the old game of Anglo-French sniping, firing entertaining blasts at the Tour’s unhelpful PR department, hostile hotel clerks, and condescending chefs. At the end, Moore clicks through 3,000 kilometers (1,863 miles) in Paris, compares his joyful, disbelieving smile to Hitler's at the Arc de Triomphe in 1940, and provides an earthy coda asserting that on some days, five breakfast croissants are not enough. Throughout, he employs colloquial British English—“bollocks,” “poxy,” and “ponce” lead the list of words, phrases, and inside national jokes that remind us we are not in Kansas anymore.
Outstanding: a must for cycling enthusiasts and recommended to lovers and haters of France, general sports fans, or anyone who has ever cheated at anything.Pub Date: June 7, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-29045-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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