The Amateurs: The Story of Four Young Men and Their Quest for an Olympic Gold Medal

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The Amateurs: The Story of Four Young Men and Their Quest for an Olympic Gold Medal Pub. Date: 5/28/1996 Publisher: Random House Publishing Group

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The Amateurs: The Story of Four Young Men and Their Quest for an Olympic Gold Medal Pub. Date: 8/1/1986 Publisher: Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated
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The Amateurs: The Story of Four Young Men and Their Quest for an Olympic Gold Medal (1st ed) Pub. Date: 7/1/1985 Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

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Overview

"Astonishing . . . Moving . . . One of the best books ever written about a sport."
*Walter Clemons Newsweek

"A PENETRATING, FASCINATING AND REMARKABLY SUSPENSEFUL NARRATIVE."
*David Guy Chicago Tribune In The Amateurs, David Halberstam once again displays the unique brand of reportage, both penetrating and supple, that distinguished his bestselling The Best and the Brightest and October 1964. This time he has taken for his subject the dramatic and special world of amateur rowing. While other athletes are earning fortunes in salaries and-or endorsements, the oarsmen gain fame only with each other and strive without any hope of financial reward.
What drives these men to endure a physical pain known to no other sport? Who are they? Where do they come from? How do they regard themselves and their competitors? What have they sacrificed, and what inner demons have they appeased? In answering these questions, David Halberstam takes as his focus the 1984 single sculls trials in Princeton. The man who wins will gain the right to represent the United States in the 84 Olympiad; the losers will then have to struggle further to gain a place in the two- or four-man boats. And even if they succeed, they will have to live with the bitter knowledge that they were not the best, only close to it.
Informative and compelling, The Amateurs combines the vividness of superb sportswriting with the narrative skills of a Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent.
"RIVETING."
*Christopher Lehmann-Haupt The New York Times
"[A] MASTERFUL JOB . . . Maintains the suspense to the very last stroke . . . Halberstam makes us care about the four men, their disappointments and the brutal testing of their friendships."
*Dan Levin Sports Illustrated

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780449910030
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Publication date: 5/28/1996
Pages: 224
Sales rank: 108,882
Product dimensions: 5.11 (w) x 7.98 (h) x 0.63 (d)

Meet the Author

David Halberstam

One of the most popular and imitated nonfiction writers around, David Halberstam wrote books that fused narrative storytelling with investigative reporting. The result: stories that hummed with energy and authority and reads as well as -- if not better than -- some novels.

Biography

A journalist, historian, and biographer, David Halberstam brought his idiosyncratic and stylistic approach to heavy subjects: the Vietnam War (in 1972's The Best and the Brightest); the shaping of American politics (in 1979's The Powers That Be); the American economy's relationship with the automobile industry (in 1986's The Reckoning); and the civil rights movement (in 1998's Freedom Riders).

His books were loaded with anecdotes, metaphors, suspense, and a narrative tone most writers reserve for fiction. The resulting books -- many of them huge bestsellers -- gave Halberstam heavyweight status (he won the Pulitzer for international reporting in 1964) and established him as an important commentator on American politics and power.

Halberstam was also known for his sports books. In The Breaks of the Game, which a critic for The New York Times called "one of the best books I've ever read about American sports," he took on professional basketball.

In The Amateurs, he examined the world of sculling; in Summer of '49 and October 1964, he focused on two pivotal baseball events: the Boston Red Sox's exasperating near victory over the New York Yankees for the 1949 pennant, and the 1964 season, when the Yankees lost the World Series to the St. Louis Cardinals. In 1999's Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made, Halberstam documented the making of a legend.

Always happy to extend his reach well beyond the subject at hand, Halberstam packed his books with social commentary as well as sports detail.

His writing routine was as strenuous and disciplined as that of any of the athletes he wrote about. To sustain his steady output of extensively researched, almost-always-massive books, he allows no unscheduled interruptions: "Most of us who have survived here [New York] after a number of years have ironclad work rules. Nothing interrupts us. Nothing," he once wrote in The New York Times. "We surface only at certain hours of the day."

Good To Know

David Halberstam's first job was as a reporter for a small-town Mississippi newspaper.

1. Date of Birth:
  
  April 10, 1934
2. Place of Birth:
  
  New York, New York
1. Date of Death:
  
  April 23, 2007
2. Place of Death:
  
  San Francisco, California
1. Education:
  
  B.A., Harvard, 1955

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The Amateurs: The Story of Four Young Men and Their Quest for an Olympic Gold Medal

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