Mind Over Water : Lessons on Life from the Art of Rowing

Rating:
Summary: Gaack! Just when I'd given up highlighting my books. . .
Review: "Mind Over Water" falls into the category of the memoire, highly personal and considered memories and musings. It's about rowing and, as the subtitle states: "Lessons on Life from the Art of Rowing." If you don't like this kind of book, steer clear. You also won't like "Green Thoughts: A Writer in The Garden." On the other hand, if you do like this kind of book, "Green Thoughts" is also recommended.

"Mind over Water" is about rowing internalized, what it means to row and race and how these lessons can be applied to life. As such, its primary goal is not so much instruction as translation. And translations, of course, are never exact, which may account for some of the animosity of other reviewers.

So what is "Mind Over Water" really about? It's not so much about rowing as it is about what rowing means to the author. As such, you can't really fault it for not being the book you might write about rowing or for not being an instruction manual. It has humbler ambitions. Think of it as an off-water musing.

In any case, I liked it. And, yes, I had to get to get out the highlighter. Among those who like the book, everyone is going to have favorite passages, as some of these reviews attest. Here are some of mine:

"Edges form outlines. If our boundaries determine our identities, then we learn who we are by finding our limits."

"Sliding between dark and shadow, between sunlight and the obscure, is the region of discovery."

"Staying on course limits your attention to the boat and its rowers, who are, after all, the motor that takes you there. The goal does not disclose itself until it is attained."

"Mistakes shine a spotlight on our model of reality and show us its flaws. Unexpected outcomes help us refine our picture of nature."

"Tall smokestacks rise from the powerhouse and waft plumes of smoke into the sky, the epitaph of fuel burned into power."

If this kind of writing disturbs or bores you, look elsewhere. If not, you might find "Mind Over Water" as enjoyable as I did.



Rating:
Summary: "Forbes FYI" review
Review: "A curious and well-wrought meditation on the relationship of rowing, with its taxing monotony and intricate systems of balance and velocity, to life, which certainly shares those features. Lambert is a philomath who, after crew at Harvard, couldn't quite settle on a single path. Sensing his life wasn't following a proper trajectory, he turned to rowing for inspiration and found in it a paradigm: it requires poise, symmetry, forward motion, cooperation, concentration and consistency. His reflections on how to focus one's energies in order to attain harmony in life and work will remind some of the now-classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; Lambert's book shares with that one a thoughtful writing style that's meaningful without ever lapsing into treacly New Age mush. It's also a great primer on the mechanics of rowing, which to hear Lambert describe it, is a hell of a lot harder than it looks from the shoreline."

Rating:
Summary: as much about self-discovery as about rowing
Review: A book that aspires to describe perfection better start with a sentence that aspires to perfection.

This is how Mind Over Water begins: "In the darkness, deep in silence, the lights --- green, red, a few of white --- surge ahead, in the rhythm of breathing."

If this were a class, Butler could riff for 10 minutes on that line. For now, let's leave it at this: You're in a long, narrow boat, with a skin that's just one-sixteenth of an inch thick and oars that extend fifteen feet. It's 5:45 a.m. on an October morning in Boston. It's chilly. And you are about to begin a race that is the equivalent of climbing Mt. Everest. On a Tuesday morning. Before work. Just for fun.

Okay, Craig Lambert, a veteran oarsman and a stylish writer, is a little bit crazy. Well, so are the best rowers. And so is Harry Parker, the Harvard crew coach whose exploits first got Lambert, a gifted amateur, interested in writing professionally about the sport.

You never heard of Harry Parker? He'd be thrilled. Recognition is the least thing he cares about. He's single-minded about something else: winning. And win he does. He became Harvard's crew coach in 1963, when he was just 27. For the next 6 years, Harvard did not lose a single intercollegiate race. His crews won 18 consecutive races against Yale. His winning percentage from 1963 to 1997 is .806 --- he is, very probably, the most successful coach in any sport in the whole and entire world.

Harry Parker has some voodoo wisdom that Craig Lambert has absorbed. And then there are the home truths Lambert's picked up himself along the way. Some samples:

"Speed demands that we risk our balance. Velocity comes with volatility... That which is stable is slow."

"Being part of a crew makes the individual shine; in rowing you pull harder and longer that you could ever alone because everyone else in the boat is depending on you."

"My years of rowing in eights [eight-man boats] convinced me that to succeed in this world we must be willing to do whatever is required despite what our mind says."

"Sometimes the best response to stormy weather is to unleash your own tempest. It is one way to restore equilibrium."

"Grabbing an early lead costs energy, an expense that may later haunt the front-runner... In practice, Parker would remind his rowers that when opponents jump out in front, you must make them pay the price."

"To build a winning crew, select the right athletes, place them in the proper seats, and allow for the freedom to create. In other words, hire the right people for the right jobs and manage with a long, loose leash."

If you're employed in almost any organization Butler can imagine, he'll bet that last idea is one you'd like to print out and slip under the boss's door. That's light years away from the sport of rowing --- and yet it's not New Age, hippy-dippy sloganeering. What it is, Butler submits, is writing at a level we're not used to seeing very often: prose that yokes close observation of the real world with deep wisdom about the world inside.

"We are out here in the darkness to reveal ourselves, to discover who we are," Lambert writes. "With the oars, we attempt things that we cannot do, we confront that which is beyond our capacities. Mind over water. The shells transport us into the unknown."

It almost makes you want to get out there some early morning and see how far, how fast, how smoothly you could make a boat --- or, really, your life --- go.



Rating:
Summary: Makes me want to get back into a shell
Review: An on-again-off-again oarsman, I can appreciate Lamgbert's lyrical rendition of the sport and overlook its technical inadequacies...this is a great quick read. His philosophy may not stay with me, but the model will - a middle aged man drawing deeply from the nourishment of a great sport.

Rating:
Summary: Mind over water Lessons on life from the art of rowing
Review: Craig Lambert's Book 'Mind over water: Lessons on life from the art of rowing' attempts to explain how rowing can be a metaphor for life. 'attempts' being the key word there. Being a rower myself, I found that his ideas were so far fetched and in some cases I had no idea how they related to both life and the sport of rowing that we both share. I had to skip over many of the parts that were wordy, and it seems many of the paragraphs could be re-written to be half the length. I am not an english Major, but I did notice that he Author has not organized his thoughts very well. I found that one idea many times did not follow the next. Lambert included some unecessary bits of information such as where he played as a child, and much about his career as an adult. As much as I disliked Craig Lambert's book, he did at least use the correct rowing terminology. But all in all I would not reccomend ambert's book to my fellow crewmates.

Rating:
Summary: Makes me want to write my own book about rowing.
Review: Craig, just do not tell me that it is not about winning the race and that the gold medal around your neck is not the most divine feeling on Earth! What you fail to point out is that it takes some talent in addition to lots of hard work to get there. That talent is "a gift of God" and if you have it, it can turn you from a novice to an Olympian rower in only 2-3 years. It takes a great coach to discover and nurture that talent, and that is why my favourite parts of the book are your descriptions of some charizmatic rowing coaches from US.

Rating:
Summary: Entertaining insight into the sport
Review: For someone who has come to the sport of rowing at a relatively late stage, Lambert offers a remarkably perceptive insight into what motivates competitive oarsmen, their fears, aspirations, joys and pain. He elucidates particularly well the different mind-set of the single sculler as against the crew oarsman, demonstrating clearly the existence of a 'sport within a sport'. There have been a number of books on rowing - it is rare and refreshing to find one written by one with journalistic skill.

Rating:
Summary: It is very inspirational book
Review: I am a experienced rower in CT and I love this book. My dad bought it for me. It talks about rowing in a philosophical way. Well, I like this book because it is saying rowing is a mental sport aswell as a physical one. It is! No one can question me on that point. I have been into rowing since I was 4 years old. My older brother rowed and I would go out into the launch with the coach and get to tell him what to do. There I learned how to be a coach. I have been rowing for years. I row 2 seasons out of the year and run the other 2. At my high school we only have rowing in the spring and summer. I love the sport very much. This book is a GREAT book for rowers of all levels. So the next time you are about to do a race piece remember to relax your body not your mind. You need to keep your body relaxed even when you are start with a 36 and then your cox is telling you to do a power 30 at a 32, your legs are tired from the the start you did and your hands are bleeding because of the blisters on your hands. Yes, I have had the dreaded blisters. But after toughing my hands up instead of blisters I have calluses which are no better. Well, at least they don't hurt! HA!HA!HA! This book reminds me a whole lot of my summer coach, back to back '95(Finland) and '96(Scotland)lightweight women's pair world champion Ellen Minzner. It has really changed my mind about rowing, and now I row better because I have seen rowing through a different light. So I would recommend this book for rowers of all levels(club or world champions).

Rating:
Summary: Godel, Escher, Bach meets Jonathan Livingston Seagull
Review: I don't know when I've read a more unfortunately flawed book -- unfortunately, because while there are snippets of truly inspired writing in it, they are overwhelmed by too many examples of what Strunk and White have told us all not to do. The author, evidently a successful journalist, seems to lose all sense of restraint in the book-length format: pithiness is absent as points are belabored to death; metaphors are piled three- and four-deep until all sense of the original subject is lost; and a sense of appropriate diction is tossed out the window in favor of florid, show-off vocabulary that causes the reader to wince in sympathetic embarrassment. Perhaps most telling, the author never seems to find an authentic voice. Compelling books on sports have been written from the perspective of both the insider and the outsider; Lambert seems to try for both, and is convincing as neither. He drops the names of rowing greats he has shared the river with, yet never seems to find his own place as a rower, the level at which he can simply put his head down and work at it without concern for what others are doing. Constantly fretting at his own inadequacies and questioning whether he has any right to consider himself a "real athlete", he articulates a series of vague goals that are best summed up as a desire not to be last -- or at least, not last by too much. The result, for the reader, is to end up wondering why Lambert is in this endeavor -- rowing or writing -- and if the author himself doesn't seem to know, why should the reader care?

Rating:
Summary: seductive sports saga
Review: I had fun with this book. As a rower who has been on national teams and medaled at the Olympic Games,I resonated with this saga of rowing and what it means to those who do it. Some sports books I have read take the perspective of the outsider, the spectator. In sharp contrast, this one comes from someone who has really "been there," who has experienced training, racing, winning and losing. This is the real thing. The author extrapolates down-to-earth, practical experiences to worldly, spiritual, and even cosmic insights. Highly recommended.