Rating: 
Summary: A very enjoyable work
Review: "The Perfect Mile" is a fascinating book. It combines character studies of three milers competing to break the four-minute barrier with an enjoyable historical account. It is a well-written and compelling work.
Rating:
Summary: A very enjoyable work
Review: "The Perfect Mile" is a fascinating book. It combines character studies of three milers competing to break the four-minute barrier with an enjoyable historical account. It is a well-written and compelling work.
Rating:
Summary: The Perfect Incentive
Review: A thrilling book and an inspiration to all those who love competition and always try to improve themselves not only in sports but in every aspect of their lives.
Rating: 
Summary: Can't Wait for the Movie
Review: Based on ample first-hand details gleaned from interviewing Roger Bannister, John Landy and Wes Santee, "The Perfect Mile" provides a nuanced character study of what drives these three great men toward breaking the most elusive of athletic goals: the four-minute-mile. While serious students of the sport will know the outcome of this tale before reading it, Neal Bascomb is able to create and maintain a fair amount of suspense by allowing the reader to experience events leading up to the 1954 Empire Games showdown from three very different perspectives.
Roger Bannister is the thinking man's runner, with the classic middle distance athlete's long stride and finishing kick as well as insights into the scientific principles that underlie cardiovascular exertion. These strengths, however, are offset by the demanding medical studies that severely limit his training time and by his tendency to become overwrought before big races.
John Landy is the workhorse of the trio, logging more miles than the others and able to bring a single-minded focus to the task. But he lacks the closing speed and power of the classic milers, forcing him to run the legs out of his competitors from the front.
Wes Santee, the least famous and accomplished of the three, may well be the most talented. Yet the demands of his University of Kansas track schedule, military commitments, and confrontations with track and field's governing body are impediments that prove too difficult to overcome.
For me, the best part of this book was the fact that these three men pursued this historic goal in a noble and dignified fashion that made you really pull for each of them somehow to be the first. None of the spoils of today's professional athletes was available, so each of them was motivated by the simple ideal of achieving the impossible. I also admired the way in which the author tied this athletic quest to the world events of the 1950s, creating a strong resonance between the historic events taking place on the track and the happenings in the politics and culture of the times.
-Kevin Joseph, author of "The Champion Maker"
Rating:
Summary: Seabiscuit meets Chariots of Fire
Review: May 6, 1954. On that day a half-century ago the 4-minute mile was finally, irrevocably broken. They said it couldn't be done, that it was beyond the scope of human endurance. Even as the 20th century wound down, this penultimate event was treated with a hallowed reverence; Sports Illustrated chose the 4-minute mile--the perfect mile--as The Greatest Sporting Achievement of the Century.On the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of the perfect mile, and with the Summer Olympic Games in Athens only weeks away, THE PERFECT MILE by Neil Bascomb couldn't be any timelier. And with the movie adaptation of THE PERFECT MILE currently in production with Universal, Spyglass--the same studio that produced a little movie called SEABISCUIT--expect this book to have a loooooong shelf life. Speaking of SEABISCUIT, Neil Bascomb has a charismatic narrative voice not unlike Laura Hillenbrand's. In THE PERFECT MILE, he weaves together the biographies of three amazing and strikingly different athletes--Bannister, the Oxford-educated amateur sports-for-sports-sake archetype with his come-from-behind running style; Landy, the Aussie with the unorthodox training methods, and a relentless wire-to-wire front runner; and lastly Santee, the American, a tough Kansas-born farmer's son that history forgot. Three men, one quest: The Perfect Mile. READ THIS BOOK, PEOPLE!!!
Rating: 
Summary: Tedious
Review: Music and sport are two exhilarating aspects of life that often fall flat when spun out to book-length treatment. While I've read many good essays and magazine articles on both, there are few books about either that manage to capture what is is so viscerally thrilling about each. Another common pitfall of music and sports writing is the descent into minutiae that moves the topic from the realm of the general reading into the navel-gazing inner circle of the enthusiast. So, although I can read thousands of pages about my favorite band or book after book about the intersection of culture, politics, and soccer, I certainly don't expect the average person to share either enthusiasm. All of which is a roundabout preface to my reaction to this particular book, which was largely boredom.
The quest for the four-minute mile is certainly a worthy topic for sports historians to cover, there's no doubt about that. And I'm not ill disposed to tales of running, in fact, I ran cross-country (badly) in college. When I started the book, the contrast between the three subjects, Bannister, Landy, and Santee made me hopeful. But the more I read, the more thin it all seemed--like a magazine article expanded to its limits. We get the full backgrounds of each man and the paths that took them to competitive running--montages that come across as sappy and read as if they were treatments for a TV movie. Alternating between the three men, Bascomb shows the buildup to and disaster of the '52 Helsinki Olympics, which are portrayed rather choppily. Then there is endless detail of training regimens, diets, and so forth, which gets tedious very quickly. So tedious, in fact, that after making my way through a third of the book, I returned it to the library. Ultimately, I ceased to care about the micro-details and politicking involved, and I never got a sense of the exhilaration of the actual running.
Rating:
Summary: A Thrilling Account of Breaking the Big Barrier
Review: Our systems of measurements are arbitrary; a mile is an artificial distance, and a minute is an artificial time. But everyone has heard the phrase "the four minute mile." It might be arbitrary, but as a footrace there is also some symmetry to it. Four minutes, four times around the quarter mile track, a strict fifteen miles per hour. For years, the four minute mile was a monument as an impenetrable barrier, and when Roger Bannister broke the barrier fifty years ago, the whole world took notice. It was Bannister's victory, of course, and often he was depicted as a lone athlete out to break the record, but there is more to the story. In _The Perfect Mile: Three Athletes, One Goal, and Less than Four Minutes to Achieve It_ (Houghton Mifflin), Neal Bascomb gives a full and exciting history of events leading to one of the most impressive accomplishments in sports. Necessarily, the other two runners, Australian John Landy and American Wes Santee are mere also-rans, but their efforts were heroic, and as Bascomb makes clear, there may have been only matters of happenstance, like weather, that kept them from being first. Like Bannister, they had failed to get medals in the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, and returned home determined to take the four minute mile upon their return home. Bannister was restricted by his medical studies; he could not train for hours every day, as the others did, so he had to concentrate his training into exhausting short daily bursts. His medical background helped, however, in researching the effects of exercise, giving him scientific assurance he could do it. On 6 May 1954 Bannister made a real try at the barrier. He had, by that time, taken on a coach, and he had two friends to serve as pacemakers. The breaking of the record was a worldwide sensation. It is not, however, the perfect mile of the title. Even the jubilant British press questioned just how cricket it was to use pacemakers and not sheer competition, and the three aspirants in the quest had never run against each other. The three were scheduled to run in the Empire games in Vancouver three months after Bannister's epochal run, which would satisfy everyone as to who was the fastest miler. The only pacemakers would be the runners themselves. There were heartbreaking complications that prevented Santee from running; they had to do with US athletic authorities who persecuted and banned him because he allegedly breached his amateur status. Both Bannister and Landy did under four minutes in Vancouver in an exciting race, thrillingly described here. This was a classic victory. There was no hint of doping, television did not make it into an extravaganza, and the competitors were not millionaires. The result made front page headlines all over the world; what subsequent footrace has done that? _The Perfect Mile_ thus takes us back to a simpler time, but this is a welcome story of timeless heroes.
Rating:
Summary: Close enough to perfect
Review: Picking up the book I already knew who was the first person to break the 4 minute mile barrier. I was also vaguely aware that an American, Australian and Englishman were all challenging for it. The intense backgrounds and thoughts of the three that are provided are not what makes this book so wonderful. The book is written so well that until the tape is broken in any race you don't know the result. Unless you know the exact history of this herculean effort the reader doesn't know when the barrier will be broken and when world records are set. Reading this book I was actually feeling the excitment and tension of the races and the shear exhaustion that hit them, but didn't stop them until crossing the finish line. I felt the extreme disappointment when once again heart and soul was poured into a race and it just wasn't good enough. None of the three ever competed against each other in the mile until after the barrier was broken. There was a first, but in the head to head race that eventually happens who will be best? These three men where truly extrodinary and I was rivetted from start to finish.
Rating:
Summary: Three Athletes and an Impossible Goal
Review: Sub-Title: Three Athletes, One Goal, and Less Than Four Minutes to Achieve It.
It's hard to believe that it's been fifty years since Roger Bannister ran the mile in less than four minutes. It was considered impossible. But he did it.
Today, advances in nutrition science and technology have allowed more than 2,000 runners to finish under four minutes. Amby Burfoot, the 1968 Boston Marathon champion and Runner's World executive editor, describes the difference in athletes today as being full-time professional runners who make hundreds of thousands of dollars compared to Bannister, who was a medical student who enjoyed running.
"Today's athletes run five to eight times as many miles a week as Bannister probably did," said Burfoot. "They also avail themselves to a team of nutritionists, sports psychologists and exercise physiologists who analyze their breathing and muscle fiber." As a result they have cut fifteen seconds off of Bannister's time.
This book is not on these modern runners, it's about doing the impossible. It's the story of three people: Roger Bannister, John Landy and Wes Santee who set out to do this impossible task. Written with a great deal of access to all three men, this is a supurb book that should make all three the heros they deserve to be.
Rating:
Summary: Nearly a perfect book on the subject
Review: The greatness of this book isn't in recounting "the race" that saw the 4:00-mile barrier broken. Rather, the greatness of this book is in the tracing of the lives of the three men racing to be the first to accomplish the task. It's a fascinating character study of three vastly different young men, all from different continents, all trying to attain the unattainable. Most people with a sense of track history already know who got there first; knowing doesn't lessen the enjoyment of reading about the quest. Besides, the author continues the story to the end of each man's racing career, so the reader isn't left with an incomplete tale.
The author does a great job of providing the reader insights into what made each runner tick - and didn't spare the warts. One gets to see it all; the positive and negative qualities of each man's drive to be first. The author also did a masterful job of setting the background for the quest, and the support (or lack thereof) that each man's circle (friends, coaches, national federations, government) provided for him. (The self-serving, anti-athlete leadership of the USA AAU in the 1950s comes through loud and clear.)
By the end of the book, I'm not sure which runner I admire the most (or the least). To me, that makes it a solidly successful read and gives the brain something to think about long after the book has been put down.
(Note: There is a center section of pictures. Like most books that contain pictures only in the middle, they give an overview of the whole story. If you don't want to know the end, it's pretty easy to skip the pictures until after you've read. How hard is that?)
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