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Rating: 
Summary: Powerful and inspirational
Review: I hate Chicken Soup for the Soul books. I'm not interested in reading a book that makes you feel warm and musy for three seconds and then allows you to live your life the same way thereafter. So normally, I won't read an "inspirational" book. But this book was amazing! First of all, it didn't just talk about who we would expect, like Moses or Krayzelburg. This just went into detail about one swim club, and shared the stories of the top swimmers from there, even though they weren't all gold medalists. Further, you got to see all sides of their story. How they got into swimming, what the press thought of them, how they interacted with each other, how they did at other meets. The whole book is so interesting, and you will laugh and you will cry. Most importantly you will stay up until 4AM all week until you finish it because this is not a book you can easily put down!
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Summary: The Essence of Swimming
Review: If you are not a swimmer already, you will want to be after completing this book. If you are a swimmer, then you will be thankful that someone has captured the essence of what those elite athletes at the other end of the pool do while you slog it out at 5 AM in the morning.
Mullen does an unbelievable job capturing the unrelenting workouts, the devastating highs, the excruciating lows, and reality of what happens when you stick your neck out there to pursue a dream.
Finally, as a competitive swimmer, Mullen is able to capture the awesomeness of these Olympians and at the same time showing that these people are indeed mere mortals. Most of the Olympians that I have seen train and have had the opportunity are much like Tom Wilkens: hard working, determined people who love their sport and are very approachable.
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Summary: Tom Wilkens rules!
Review: If you've ever done swimming workouts, you will be in awe reading about the work that Tom Wilkens does in the pool. The author explains how his body turns scarlet red from the high intensity put forth. And the incredibly fast practice times.Well, the book covers the resurrected Santa Clara Swim Club and its devoted coaches, Jochums and Bitter. The people written about, coaches and swimmers alike, are covered with the development you would expect from a seasoned fiction writer. Elite swimmers - Human? More human than humanly possible. Oh - in Japan yesterday, Tom Wilkens took first in the 200 I.M. at the Pan Pacs. He's the oldest on the US team over there - but not to be deterred!
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Summary: WOW!! What an eye opener.
Review: Most people have no idea what an competitive swimmer has to do to qualify for the olympics. My children have been swimming competitively for 7 years now at local and state events and even to us this book is an eye opener.
I recommend this to anyone who is even remotely interested in swimming as a sport or the olympics as a whole. The general public sits in front of our TV's and watch the olympics and say "wow that swimmer swam really fast". It becomes so much more than that. What makes a swimmer? Is it his natural ability to swim fast or is it the one who trains the hardest swims the fastest. This book clarifies that it is a combination of several factors that carries a person to the olympic dream.
After reading this book I guarantee that all of us will look upon Olympic athletes in a different light. I commend the author and the swimmers of the Santa Ana Swim club for opening up their doors and lives so that the rest of us can get a glimpse of what it is really like to strive for the ultimate goal. Thank you, Thank you, Thank you!
Rating: 
Summary: *An inside look at elite training and coaching
Review: Mullen writes well and provides insights that only a former competitive swimmer could convey about the physical and emotional rigors of elite training. Overall, I loved the book and was fascinated to learn of the sacrifices made by coaches and swimmers alike as they prepared for the olympic trials of 2000. Mullen's detailed description of the inner thinking of Coach Jochums of the Santa Clara Swim club is enlightening, but also somewhat disturbing. Though Mullen provides much evidence to suggest that Jochums coaching practices are often punitive and even abusive at times, Mullen minimizes the potential harmfulfulness of Jochums' behavior and appears to overvalue Jochum's impact and effectiveness, even referring to Jochums as one of swimming's best motivators. I also wish that Mullen had focused more of his attention on some of the other, less well known swimmers who were training and swimming at the time. Despite these drawbacks, I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in learning about swimmers' depth of committment and intensity of training and preparation during the months and weeks leading up to the Olympic Games
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding
Review: Outstanding work by Mullen! Like, Larry Bird's book 'Drive' this book is perfect for all athletes not just the target sport. All athletes can appreciate the love, joy and devastation of the Olympic games. The determination and courage of the swimmers combined with Mullen's smooth writing brings to the reader a tremendous experience. After finishing this book, I went out and ran 5 miles. Don't waste money on Harry Potter this year, read about the heroes of the real world.
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Summary: You'll race to finish reading this book
Review: P. H. Mullen writes in his book, "Gold in the Water," that due to the nature of the sport, most competitive swimmers dream of Olympic glory. Our 13-year-old son is no exception. When this book was advertised on the USA Swimming website I knew it would be a winner with him as a Christmas gift. The book gets into the heads, minds, and hearts of the coaches and swimmers from the Santa Clara Swim Club as they prepared for the 2000 Olympics in Sydney. Mr. Mullen also is able to make the reader understand some of the complexities and paradoxes of competitive swimming--which made us nod in agreement as we read. Why, for example, is it that a swimmer who finishes first in a race can be disappointed while one who finishes sixth (or even dead last) may be ecstatic? When the book arrived at my work, I glanced through it and was immediately drawn in.... so much so that I ended up reading the book before giving to our son. I carried it around in a plain manila envelope so he wouldn't see what I had. I couldn't for the life of me remember how these swimmers faired in Sydney so for me it was a race to the end of the book. In addition to telling the story of the men of the Santa Clara Swim Club, "Gold in the Water" explores both the heartache and joy of the Olympic dream including the intense amount of training required before one can even begin to live that dream. I've recommended this book to all the swim parents at our local Aquatic Center and also to friends who "just don't get it" when it comes to understanding what the world of competitive swimming is like. As for our son, he, too, enjoyed the book, spent his free time during Christmas break reading it, and used it for the basis of his book report due when school resumed in January.
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Summary: Compelling and engrossing
Review: This book is a compelling and engrossing character study of a group of super-achieving athletes with congruent but sometimes competing aspirations. It has an excellent narrative drive that made it a real page-turner, and perhaps because it pulls no punches in its treatment of its focal characters, the reader is left with a deep appreciation for the complex and usually (but not always) admirable qualties of elite athletes. Swimmers tend to be smart, and this is an intelligent treatment of both swimming and competition in general: this book is to the standard sports expose as collegiate swimmers' GPAs are to the GPAs of (pick your contact sport) players. Although I read this on the recommendation of a friend who is a serious swimmer, I feel it deserves an audience far beyond the competitive swimming world, for which I'm sure it will be required reading.
Rating: 
Summary: Gold in the water.
Review: This book was so inspiring to me.I have been a swimmer my whole life, and this book truely show the challenges and the hurttles that swimmer have to face. I think that they are true rolemodels, they had a dream of going to the Olympics and they chased that dream never giving up. They acheived the dream of olympic glory.This book beautifully showed the relasionship between the swimmers and there coach, and how together they achevied there dream.
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Summary: Very well done--this review is for those who read the book.
Review: This review is essentially for those who have already read this book, so if you haven't, I can only say that the author did a very good job and I would recommend it. If I had any nits, I would say that at times, the book verged a bit on the melodramatic side and at other times seemed to repeat itself (not literally but in retelling, for example, the battles betwen Jochums and his swimmers) so that I felt as if I were reading the same scenarios more than once. However, one of the things I had intended to criticize actually turned out to be a feature I liked about the book (and this gets into why I say this review is for those who have read the book). On page xiii of the Introduction, the author tells us that the 2000 Summer Olympic Gammes "were the most successful in history", that "15 U.S. national records were set", and that "the Olympic Games serve as this book's final exclamation point." (He does also say that "this book is not about that story", but then adds "at least not at first", implying to me that it IS about that story at the end.) As I was reading the book, I kept thinking back to those words, and mostly with annoyance. I kept asking myself: Why did the author tell us right at the outset how the story was going to end? Why couldn't he have kept us in suspense? Now we already know that the Santa Clara swimmers he profiles are all going to win gold medals. I figured that if the Games were so successful for the U.S. athletes and the author is focusing on these particular swimmers, then it is a foregone conclusion how the story ends. Thus, when I got to the end of the book and realized that the Olympic Trials and Games were more of a nightmare than a dream for most of the dramatis personae of this book, it actually improved my opinion of the book alot, not only because I felt that the author had cleverly thrown me for a loop back in the Introduction (even if that was not his intention), but also because it really reinforces the notion that life does not always end happily after after and the merely being the hardest worker and the most dedicated person and maybe the most worthy person (think especially Wilkens and Grote) does not always make for the Disney ending. In fact I wonder, if the author had his druthers, and could have created any ending he wanted for the 5 or 6 main swimmers profiled, whether he would have chosen for them to swim to gold medals in world-record times at the Olympics or whether he would have chosen the ending as it actually occurred. I feel that, perhaps from a standpoint of the personal affection he obviously had for swimmers such as Wilkens and Grote and Wales, he obviously would choose the gold medal option. However, from a standpoint of pure literary merit, I also feel that the ending as it actually occurred made for a better book.
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