The Amateurs: The Story of Four Young Men and Their Quest for an Olympic Gold Medal
4.5/5
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About this ebook
In 1984, rowing was a sport continually relegated to the margins, far from the spotlights attracted by other Olympic events. That year, four men went head-to-head for the right to compete for gold as the United States’ single sculler, an honor that would lead not to lucrative endorsement deals, but to the fleeting glory of the Olympic Games, and the satisfaction of ranking supreme among their competitive community of oarsmen. In pursuit of that goal, the rowers pushed through crippling pain, delaying personal relationships and careers, all for the rush of winning. Determined to understand these athletes of a seemingly bygone era, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author David Halberstam chronicles their bravery and obsession, delivering a dramatic human story, buzzing with adrenaline, about the lengths to which athletes will go to prove their mettle and compete on the highest level. This ebook features an extended biography of David Halberstam.
David Halberstam
David Halberstam was one of America's most distinguished journalists and historians, a man whose newspaper reporting and books have helped define the era we live in. He graduated from Harvard in 1955, took his first job on the smallest daily in Mississippi, and then covered the early civil rights struggle for the Nashville Tennessean. He joined The New York Times in 1960, went overseas almost immediately, first to the Congo and then to Vietnam. His early pessimistic dispatches from Vietnam won him the Pulitzer in 1964 at the age of thirty. His last twelve books, starting with The Best and the Brightest and including The Powers That Be, The Reckoning, and The Fifties, have all been national bestsellers. Thirty-eight years after Mr. Halberstam won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting in Vietnam, War in a Time of Peace was the runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize. He died in April 2007.
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Reviews for The Amateurs
4 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Halberstam is an exceptional writer. This book covers the lives of 4 world-class rowers, and their struggle to make it to and win in the Olympics. While I'm not particularly interested in rowing, but if you are (or even if you're interested in underappreciated Olympic sports or athletes in general), this is worth checking out.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5An interesting look at a little-known sport. Even though Halberstam's story centers around the mid-1980s not much has changed with the popularity of rowing. People can name basketball stars, football greats, even Olympic marathon runners and sprinters, but not many can name one let alone all of the members of the last Olympic crew team. I never thought about crew being a faceless sport; a sport that is not very camera friendly. Think about it - to photograph the action accurately you cannot focus on any one particular face. I never thought about it that way. Halberstam digs deep into this relatively unknown sport to reveal how for athletes like Tiff Wood, the seeds of a competitive spirit were planted in childhood by these rowers' families: emulating older brothers or spurred on by critical fathers wanting to win, win, win. Encouragement was expressed by failure, ("better luck next time"), and compliments were reserved for the fastest times and first place wins. Reverse psychology at play. The Amateurs is a veritable who's who of the 1980s rowing world. The dozens of names bogged down the writing and made it difficult to remember who was supposed to be in which boat.