Every Second Counts
I received Every Second Counts, Lance Armstrong's latest auto-biography, yesterday. It was sitting on my doorstep when I got home. I cracked it open around 9pm. By about 12:30am I had finished it.
His previous bio read quickly also. Maybe it's my fascination with getting inside the head of a guy who can win the Tour de France year after year, to hear his perspective on the same races I watched every day on television. His bios are quite readable because he's fairly open, about as honest as an autobiography can be [one could argue that no autobiography is honest, especially Lance's since he has a co-author in Sally Jenkins molding his words and since he has millions of dollars of endorsement money to protect, but I found all sorts of surprising revelations that he didn't have to insert, and the language certainly isn't censored. For example, he writes that in retrospect, he wasn't so sure that Jan Ullrich was waiting for him when Lance fell on the climb to Luz Ardiden. Hmmmm.].
This one is much more focused on cycling, especially the last three Tours, and perhaps lacks a bit of the drama of his first autobiography. After all, how do you beat a comeback from cancer to win the Tour? But I don't digest 240+ pages in one sitting very often. Can Armstrong possibly live enough drama to fill a third book?
His previous bio read quickly also. Maybe it's my fascination with getting inside the head of a guy who can win the Tour de France year after year, to hear his perspective on the same races I watched every day on television. His bios are quite readable because he's fairly open, about as honest as an autobiography can be [one could argue that no autobiography is honest, especially Lance's since he has a co-author in Sally Jenkins molding his words and since he has millions of dollars of endorsement money to protect, but I found all sorts of surprising revelations that he didn't have to insert, and the language certainly isn't censored. For example, he writes that in retrospect, he wasn't so sure that Jan Ullrich was waiting for him when Lance fell on the climb to Luz Ardiden. Hmmmm.].
This one is much more focused on cycling, especially the last three Tours, and perhaps lacks a bit of the drama of his first autobiography. After all, how do you beat a comeback from cancer to win the Tour? But I don't digest 240+ pages in one sitting very often. Can Armstrong possibly live enough drama to fill a third book?