Rating: 
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.
Rating:
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.
Rating:
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: A Gold Medal Book!
Review: This book offers a great insight into the "psyche" of an Olympic athlete. It was interesting, informative, and inspirational. Swimmers and non-swimmers would enjoy this book. It was the first time that I felt like I was "inside" the athlete while he was training! It's a motivating book written by someone who has a great knowledge of the making of a champion. All readers will be inspired whether they're training to make Olympic cut-off times or just to push themselves a bit more in aerobics class! I could not put the book down once I started reading it!
Rating:
Summary: Read this book!
Review: This book was an excellent example of human will and the sacrifices an athlete makes to achieve a dream. It was an engrossing page turner and I highly recommend it.
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.
Rating:
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.
Rating:
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.
Rating:
Summary: awesome, awesome book !!
Review: wow, this book reads like a novel and makes you care about the outcomes. it should be a movie. what i liked best was how humble and down to earth the characters were. every one you root for and care about. And of course you want them to win! This is an awesome, awesome book and it is completely unforgettable. I never recommend books but this is a total winner!
| 
