Customer Reviews: Read 2 more reviews...
 Good photos, but little else... August 25, 2008
If you know nothing about "Le Tour" - or you like old photos of "Le Tour" - then this might be a book for you... but be warned, there is nothing of substance here. It is written with such economy in terms of words/per year (a small page or two for each year the Tour has been held) that you cannot get any real sense of the race itself.
I enjoyed Matt Rendell's "The Death of Marco Pantani", I liked his style and the sympathy he gave his subject. However, there is no comparison between his writing in that book, and the style he employs in this.
In "Blazing Saddles" Rendell is terse, cynical and at times cruel. He fails to achieve anything much, except to present to the reader a number of wonderful old Tour photos (with dubious and rather disrespectful captions), a small muddled and at times oblique summary of each race, along with the top three finishers.
If you want to read about the Tour De France, there are a wealth of fantastic, informative, books out there, and this is most definitely not one of them.
Two stars - as the pictures are great and it is easy to flick through.
A Superficial Snow Job July 17, 2008
As a reference book, a quick and easy guide to look up and see who won which tour when, this book has its uses. As a basic introduction to the history of the tour and some of it's stars it is passable. As a 'history' per se of the tour it is not really up to scratch. It utterly fails to portray the drama, the romance and the pathos of this legendary sporting event.
That is not really the fault of the writer so much as the format. Every tour is so deep so dramatic that they probably warrant 200 pages each, to try cover every tour in 200 pages with photos was always going to be superficial. Notabley the post war tours, where records are more readily available are described in a little more detail and much more evocatively. Unfortunately this suggests a good writer who was limited through time or inclination in researching the earlier tours more comprehensively.
Ultimately I was most dissapointed by the failure to really address the doping issue. The "they used to cheat by taking the train" stories are unhelpful in any discussion of how drugs are affecting sport, and the dismissal of Simeoni as "a not very good italian rider" was frankly pathetic. If cycling is to remain a vaild sport and the tour retain/ regain its place as on of the great sporting events it will be through the bravery of men like Simeoni and Bassons, rather than superficial Hagiographies like this one.
 A long list January 22, 2008
Very turgid. You find yourself going from 1910 to 1960 and thinking did anything happen in those years. I would expect more if I entered "history of the tour de france" in Wikipedia.
 A whistlestop tour of the Tour December 11, 2007
Matt Rendell changes gear after the excellent DEATH OF MARCO PANTANI for something a little lighter. No real exposes here, rather a slightly sideways celebration of the Tour de France's convoluted history. Doesn't shy away from the race's darker side - which, as the author concludes, is source for much of the Tour's legend - but does it with humour and insight. Nice to see that some care has been taken over the design and production, with a good selection of vintage photographs and contemporary quotes accompanying each entry. Funny and thought-provoking - a good introduction to the World's Toughest Race.
Tedious October 9, 2007
4 out of 6 found this review helpful
I bought this book and although I read the whole thing, I was glad to have finished it. The couple of pages devoted to each Tour gradually become repetitive and tiresome, and this book offers nothing that hasn't been mentionned before. You are effectively reading the same words for each tour, repeated page after page. It will sit on my shelf with the rest of the cycling books, but I doubt it will be re-read again in the foreseeable future.
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