Rowing Against the Current: On Learning to Scull at Forty (New York)

In the midst of the standard dreary midlife crisis -- complete with wine-tasting courses yoga classes and a failed attempt at a first novel -- forty-year-old Barry Strauss falls unexpectedly and passionately in love with rowing a sport in which a twenty-seven-year-old is a has-been. Strauss a professor of classics and history writes about the unanticipated delights of an affair that like so many others begins as a casual dalliance and develops into a full-blown obsession. Drawn to the sport in part because of his affinity for Greek antiquity he develops a love for old boathouses a longing for rivers at dawn a thirst to test himself and ultimately a renewed sense of self-reliance -- as someone who had experienced sports humiliation as far back as Little League suddenly finds himself bursting into athleticism at an unlikely age. From the awe-inspiring feats of the war-bound Greek triremes with their crews of 172 men rowing on three levels to the solitary pride of finishing a first race in which he gets stuck in the weeds and has to be fished out Barry Strauss shows us why there is nothing -- absolutely nothing -- half as much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.