Bruce Weber (2)

Maybe 3.5 stars...I feel like this is one of my favorite bike-across-the-country books, but not the favorite. The beginning half of the book was great and I was ready to make it my all-time favorite of this type, but then Weber starts getting into an earlier bike tour in Vietnam (he devotes a whole chapter to it), and discussing what Sept. 11 meant to him (although he wasn't biking at the time and it has no connection to his bike tour), and generally spending more time analyzing his life than letting us know about people and places he meets during his tour. Still - it's better than others I've read. With each new touring book I read, I hope I'm going to get some self-analysis along with vivid descriptions of places and people that are different from what I know (and hopefully what the author knows). The first half of this book does a pretty good job, but the back half is more tedious than anything.… (plus d'informations)

I read lots of books about bike touring. I dream about bike touring but actually get out for an overnighter almost never. But I read a lot of books!

Weber calls his book a semi-memoir. That label fits. It's a very personal book. He lets us know that he has been in psychotherapy for decades. He's a New Yorker, a Manhattanite! He's practically a character out of a Woody Allen movie. He got started bike touring while vacationing in the Hamptons. I'm not making this up! I have orbited from time to time just close enough to Manhattan to know that this sort of thing is actually real. Or maybe that helps me feel that reality more viscerally than a reader who has e.g. lived their whole life in Colorado Springs.

Not only that, he writes for the New York Times, and has for decades! Yeah my sister is a sort of Manhattan professional writer, so I know the type a bit. This book is so well written... it's almost too luscious. I remember a few sentences where Weber is mulling over his use of the word "creditable". The mulling is not out of place; he's got the nuances very precisely mapped. But, wow, it's like vacationing in the Hamptons. For me it is like a glimpse into a whole other world, yeah like watching a Woody Allen movie. Can you believe it, people actually live like that!

I've never gone on a big bike trip like this, so I can't say for sure whether my own reflections would mirror his. Would my reason for riding be very similar to his? I think I would reflect on that puzzle very much like Weber does. I am now planning a month-long ride and part of that is writing out a statement of purpose, of why I ride. Of course this kind of brazen ambition is very different from the result of stewing over it across northeast Montana. All that psychotherapy, all that writing of obituaries... Weber's reflections are very genuine.

It's a fine book, but it's practically more memoir than travelogue. It does put those dimensions together very well. I was thinking of sending it along to my Mom now that I have finished it. But Weber talks about how he could practically have died from heart disease out there far far from the kind of medical care that a person can get in Manhattan and probably also in the Salt Lake area where I live these days. My Mom is worried about crazy me going out on a big bike trip - I'm older than Weber was on his trip. But I don't think this book would reassure her! Maybe the next bike touring book will be better for that!… (plus d'informations)