Showing posts with label 1. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1. Show all posts

Inside the Postal Bus: My Ride with Lance Armstrong and the U.S. Postal Cycling Team Review

Inside the Postal Bus: My Ride with Lance Armstrong and the U.S. Postal Cycling Team
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Inside the Postal Bus: My Ride with Lance Armstrong and the U.S. Postal Cycling Team Review*Note I wish I could have given this book 2.5 stars*
I so wanted to like this book. As a cycling junkie since 1985, I have tried to get my hands on anything that involves European cycling. Especially first hand accounts of the European peloton. (peloton = main group or pack in a race)
I just finished Michael's book and to be honest, I was disappointed. It's not a bad read but the title of the book is a little misleading:
Inside the Postal Bus my ride with Lance Armstrong and the US Postal Cycling Team.
Now if George Hincapie or Floyd Landis had written this book, you might have gotten a more intimate picture of Lance Armstrong. But Michael usually rode for Postal's "B" team so I wasn't too shocked or disappointed that there wasn't too much material on Lance.
That being said, this was supposed to be a book about the Postal Bus and what goes on in it.
There were glimpses of what goes on in the bus and the team but Michael never goes very deep.
Maybe I'm too hard-core but I felt like he never really tells us anything about the races or the racers.
I wanted to read a few funny stories. Heck any stories. Stuff that the general public never gets to see. The closest he comes is when he and Dave Zabriske are in an elevator and they see a famous French cyclist and make fun of the fact that he has a mullet.
Unfortunately, the best and most revealing passage is not written by Michael but is in fact written by George Hincapie.
George tells us how he told Lance how much he respected and admired his gutsy performance after Lance had had a rough time trial during the 2003 Tour.
Lance said that he was touched by George's words. It was a great passage. And not for the fact that it involved Lance but because it showed the human side of the cyclists. If only the book was filled with stories like that. Whoa!
I wish he would have talked more about how hard it is to make the postal tour team.
And on how disappointed he was of not going and having to watch the tour on TV. (He had to have been disappointed it's every cyclist's dream to ride the tour. I know it was mine and when I raced I sucked).
Give us some emotion please. (If Michael was on a lesser team, I'm convinced he could be a tour rider - yes he's that good.) But we don't get anything.
If you want a more entertaining look at cycling in the European peloton, read Bob Roll's first book Bobke: A ride on the wild side of cycling. The only unfortunate thing is that it's from a different era. But it's funny. Hilarious in fact.
VELOPRESS had a golden opportunity to get an inside look at one of the greatest cycling teams ever (and not just becuase of Lance i.e. Bruyneel, Ekimov, Heras, et all)
But instead of getting inside the bus we get thrown under it.Inside the Postal Bus: My Ride with Lance Armstrong and the U.S. Postal Cycling Team OverviewDuring the professional cycling season, the members of the United States Postal Team live, train, and work together for weeks on end while traveling to competitions throughout Europe. With wit and singular insight, Michael Barry, a professional cyclist and member of the United States Postal Team, shares his first-hand knowledge of the sport and of his fellow cyclists, describing intricate pre-race orchestrations; the efforts of the coach, mechanics, team chef, and other staff members; the personalities and idiosyncrasies of his international teammates, including six-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong; and the thrilling races themselves.

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Worth More Dead: And Other True Cases (Ann Rule's Crime Files, Vol. 10) Review

Worth More Dead: And Other True Cases (Ann Rule's Crime Files, Vol. 10)
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Worth More Dead: And Other True Cases (Ann Rule's Crime Files, Vol. 10) ReviewFirst, I am a fan of Ann Rule. I feel she handles her genre expertly. With the past few crime files books, however, I found myself becoming a little disappointed although I still enjoyed her books. I felt that too much time was spent on the detectives (yes, I am sure that her police background makes her partial) and I found that old cases were being written about without any new information added. Along came this book and I purchased it expecting to be entertained but not expecting the book to be up to Ms. Rule's usual standard. Well, this book surprised me. I thoroughly enjoyed the five stories in this volume and I will now look at the next in the crime files a bit differently and without skepticism. I feel like this is a worthy book and not one that the publisher was in a hurry to get "out there" in order to make a buck. Whether you are new to Ann's book or someone who has read everything she has written, you will enjoy this book.Worth More Dead: And Other True Cases (Ann Rule's Crime Files, Vol. 10) Overview Why would a man kill his lover's husband and then his wife, the woman who fought successfully to have him paroled from prison? Why would he risk arrest by kidnapping the child of another woman who adored him? Because they were... Worth More Dead A cold case reopened -- and solved -- with dogged police work and new evidence. One of the shocking true crimes of passion and greed from Ann Rule's Crime Files. Former Marine sergeant and judo instructor Roland Pitre Jr. claimed it was all an elaborate plan to win back his wife's love -- it wasn't supposed to end with her dead body in the trunk of a car. Nearly twenty years later, he acknowledged that he had hired someone to kill his estranged wife in 1988, though his alleged excuse for why a monstrous "mistake" happened is as shocking and convoluted as the crime itself. Eventually, he was charged with first-degree murder in the long-unsolved death of Cheryl Pitre, after a mysterious witness betrayed Pitre to save his own skin. Tracing back the dark and bloody path of Pitre's life, two generations of detectives found a chain of brutal and terrifying crimes by a man who manipulated the courts and prisons to walk free.

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