Tim Moore (1)Reseñas

French Revolutions is about a person who rode the same route as the Tour de France. Think Bill Bryson's A walk in the woods but with a bicycle. Overall I really liked it, but I felt there should have been more history and tidbits about the race and route.

Still, I really liked it. I give it 3.5 revolutions out of 5 revolutions.

A fun journey to go on. Lots of interesting gems of info tucked in throughout as well. He gets a little worn out at the end, as does the story.

I found the “I’m too stupid to tie a knot thing“ tough to stomach, but once we got adjusted to it, the story was one I was happy to be along for. In the end, he was a sympathetic character but I found myself drawn in by.

I don't normally go for sports books but this one has quite a bit more to it

The Cyclist Went Out in the Cold:
Adventures Riding The Iron Curtain
Author: Tim Moore
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Publishing Date: 2017
Pgs: 340
Dewey: 796.6094 MOO
Disposition: Irving Public Library - South Campus - Irving, TX
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REVIEW MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS

Summary:
Scaling a new peak of rash over-ambition, Tim Moore tackles the 9,000km route of the old Iron Curtain on a tiny-wheeled, two-geared East German shopping bike.

Asking for trouble and getting it, he sets off at the Arctic winter’s brutal height, bullying his plucky MIFA 900 through the endless and massively sub-zero desolation of snowbound Finland.

Haunted throughout the journey by the border detritus of watchtowers and rusted razor wire, Moore reflects on the curdling of the Communist dream, and the memories of a Cold War generation reared on the fear of apocalypse – at a time of ratcheting East-West tension.

After three months, 20 countries and a 58-degree jaunt up the centigrade scale, man and bike finally wobble up to a Black Sea beach in Bulgaria, older and wiser, but mainly older.
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Genre:
Travelogue
History
Bicylce Travel
Iron Curtain
Europe

Why this book:
I love a good travelogue.
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The Feel:

Favorite Character:
The elderly Norwegian guy, 18 hours after he first started out, giving him the “you’re not from around here, are you?” He questioned him about whether he knew what the weather was like there as he rode his East German Shopping Bike a hundred miles north of the Arctic circle, sliding down Norway into Finland and on along.

The MIFA 900 shopping bike.

The German shopping bike enthusiasts giving him advice on how to modify his little East German MIFA into something that could actually make the ride all along the Iron Curtain Trail(EV-13).

EuroVelo 13 - The Iron Curtain Trail

Least Favorite Character:
Tim, himself.

Favorite Scene:
The image of droves of fisherman along that riverside in Croatia, all suntans, in Speedos, with a fishing rod in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

Favorite Quote:
Describing his 30-year-old East German shopping bike with it’s nailed snow tires as looking mean like something Mad Max's aunt would ride to bingo during the apcalypse is hilarious.

Riding a bicycle through Finland in the winter being described as a dribbled slurry of gloom and delusion.

Favorite Concept:
Arctic karma: when you live in a difficult region and find yourself in a bad situation, you must attend, 100%, on other people. They didn't want to help him, they needed to and, now, they feel happy and more safe because they can believe that someone will be there to help them when they need it.

Hmm Moments:
Finally looked at a picture of a MIFA 900 shopping bike...this sumbitch is crazy trying to ride that thing 10,000km from Norway all along the iron curtain to the Black Sea.

He dips into moral lassisitude more than a few times over the course of this hellish bike ride.

After 6,000km, having a kidney stone issue pop up along the road, and managing to drink a bunch of water and do what had to be done and stay on the road. That's a tough man, a tough, tough man.

WTF Moments:
Holy s***! The Schonenberg, East Germany landfill where trucks from the West could dump a ton of anything for $20. And the residents still have an 80% higher cancer rate than those around them. Holy s***!

Meh / PFFT Moments:
He uses way too many column inches talking about his and his wife's previous trip along there and curtain. I like this story and this adventure, but it would have been better served if the editor would have talked him and his page count down a bit, and maybe left half of the story of his and his wife's 1990 car ride around Eastern Europe out.

Wisdom:
HIs trip was horribly planned.

Juxtaposition:
I read some Ugly Americanism into the way he reacts to some of the people along his route. ...then realize that he is being an Ugly Englander. ...guess it’s something to do with all of us Englishers...or whatever the common term for all of us is. Though Ugly Canadian sounds like a contradiction in terms. The way he writes about Finland, he sounds like an ugly tourist, classic cliche-like. Frozen, winterized arctic circle bicycle riding might have impacted his appreciation, but his appreciation is still ugly sounding. Though at the end of the ride, his appreciation for those early days, especially pre-Russia, seems greatly improved.

His visit to the MIFA factory seems odd. Them inviting him and wanting it to be about the future, while what he's doing is obviously about the past.

If EV-13 follows the Iron Curtain shouldn't the trail go down the Adriatic Coast to Greece including Croatia to Albania, but instead goes through Croatia, Hungary, and Serbia across toward Romania. I'm confused about what's considered the Iron Curtain, I guess.

The Unexpected:
His visit to Probstzella and the Haus des Volkes seems very The Shining, all alone in a huge resort hotel in a town that is lost in time and cut off both because of its GDR past and it's “not here yet” future.
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Pacing:
It’s well paced.

Last Page Sound:
So, the big finish, he writes a paragraph that describes what's going on in the last 56km and, then, he's sitting on a bench with those 56km still to go waiting on his family to show up, I don't get it. Built in anticlimax. That paragraph from that last day could’ve been a chapter unto itself, as opposed to the short shrift it was given.

Questions I’m Left With:
So, was he afraid of the camp owner in Finland, the one who he was all alone with in a building full of empty beer cans in the middle of the blizzard, 3 hours from the nearest house...the one who really wanted to get him drunk. ...raised eyebrows.

Why didn't he start in Norwegian and Finnish Summertime, going in winter when it hovers around -14°C, the sweat you build up riding the bike or having breakfast...once you go outside in the Arctic could freeze solid and kill you? Of course on the other end, I wonder what those Balkan mountains would have been like in late summer or winter instead of being there in summer when they were baking him alive?

Editorial Assessment:
Should’ve been a bit more present in focusing the story on the “current” trip as opposed to previous trips through the same areas.
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This book outlines the history of the Monopoly board game takes you on a fascinating tour of London via the Monopoly board locations. It is creatively written in a lighthearted manner. It delves into interesting history behind all the M board squares. A bit crude in places, but a good entertaining read. I always thought the London based board was the original, how wrong you can be.

Growing up as a teenager in the 1980’s the cold war and the Soviet threat was very real indeed. The whole system imploded at the end of that decade and the Iron Curtain that separated Western Europe from Communist bloc for decades was drawn aside. This physical and ideological border stretched from the Black Sea all the way up to the Barents Sea on the Finnish border with the USSR. This continental wide border is now the route for Eurovelo 13 (EV13) a 10,400km trail that passes through 20 different countries, countless monuments and a huge variety of landscapes of the countries that once were opposed.

It was this route that Tim Moore sets out to cycle. Not on a fancy bike though, oh no, the one he has chosen is a two geared, tiny two wheeled shopping bike. His velocipede of choice is a MIFA 900, a bike made in the GDR with broadly similar attributes to that of the Trabant. For some mad reason he was starting on the Russian Norwegian border in the midst of an Arctic winter.

Ambitious? Definitely, but what could possibly go wrong…

The route he takes is littered by the long forgotten and sinister paraphernalia of a once impenetrable border; razor wire, rusting towers and abandoned checkpoints. Cycling on the snow on a properly prepared bike is hard enough, but riding on this remnant of the GDR it is really tough going. He is kept in high spirits by the kindness of strangers, sleeps in hotels and hostels and occasionally peoples spare rooms. His tenacity to keep pedalling is matched only by his addiction to the Magic Man energy drink with its warming addition. He meets all sorts of characters on his journey, all affected by the change as the region changed from Communist control to modern Europe and free borders.

I have read all of Moore’s other books, so I was really looking forward to this. He manages to dream up some quirky and unusual travels, walking across Spain with a donkey, locating those that have had the ignominy of getting ‘nul points’ in the Eurovision and rediscovering his inner Roman in the re-enactment world. He is ever so slight nutty, and this makes for very funny moments in his travels. His self-depreciating attitude means that he rubs along with most people he meets, and give us a series of amusing anecdotes too. It was well worth reading as have been all his others. It didn't quite reach French Revolutions though which is still one of the funniest book I have ever read.

The Giro. It is Italy's own grand tour and takes place at the end of May and has been held since 1909.

The 1914 Giro was one of the toughest that ever took place with only eight, yes eight, finishers at the end of the Tour from a start number of 81. Some of the stages were in excess of 400km long, and the competitors would start at midnight, and ride for around 24 hours.

And it is was this infamous tour that Moore decides to replicate. He has also chosen to ride it on a bike that is 100 years old with wooden rims and cork brakes and some genuine woollen garment. None of your lycra in those days. He builds the bike, a Hirondelle, himself with a lot of help from able assistants and other mechanically adept people and following a scant amount of training, boards the plane to Milan.

Moore tries where possible to follow the original route, but as there was no map kept, and roads have changed then it is not always as easy to do. The lack of training is immediately apparent, as well as the the very sharp learning curve that is the Italian traffic system. He writes about his experience in hotels and guest house from the truly superb to the frankly appalling. He easts an awful lot of pizza and tries his best to reduce the Italian red wine lake.

Moore writes in an easily accessible style, he is witty and on occasions very very funny. He has a keen eye and there is plenty of detail of the people and place that he travels through on his own tour. It is not quotes as good as French Revolutions, his book on the Tour de France, but I really enjoyed it.

Moore has excelled himself with this book. It is almost as good and as funny as french revolutions.

He takes himself on a tour of some of the worst parts of Britain, in one of the worst cars made, an Austin Maestro, with the worst 358 songs as his sound track. It takes him up the east of the country around Scotland and back down the west side and into Wales. He stays at the hotels and guest houses that have only just managed to score a single star.

And yet through all this he still finds things and places that he likes. Very funny, his wit (read sarcasm) is excellent, but the depths that some of these parts of the country have got to is despairing.

Another cycling book for the Tour de France. However this is less a cycling book than a humorous travel book through France, along the lines of Bill Bryson. Moore isn't a serious cyclist, and deliberately sets himself up for failure. Possibly he didn't prepare because he was hoping for a book deal, and figured it would be more interesting this way? I found it a bit annoying, just as much as his faux naivete or dishonestly hyperbolic descriptions (or that he skipped a lot of the Tour route). Readable, and, if you set low expectations, occasionally humorous.

You can always rely on a Tim Moore book to provide the odd chuckle and while the rationale behind "The Cyclist who went out in the cold" (someone older than me rides an old East German shopping bicycle ten thousand kilometres around the old Iron Curtin) strikes me as asking for trouble, particularly considering Moore starts his trip above the Arctic Circle in mid-winter, I did indeed have the odd chuckle.

Beyond the fact Moore seems to relish making things as difficult as possible (I don't think any reader could begrudge him for starting in northern Norway in mid-summer and finish at the Black Sea when it's say late Autumn), I always enjoy Moore's history lessons and the places and people he meets, and his self-deprecating tone is almost always appreciated.

And of course I couldn't but stop every few pages and think "this man is older than me but is able to ride a poor quality bicycle 10 000 kilometres through waist deep snow, pot holed roads while dodging mad drivers, yet I would roll into the fetal position at the mere thought of riding a bike to the other end of town.

This is my second go-around with Tim Moore but I also suspect that this is his last insane bike adventure as short of riding the length of the Great Wall of China on a unicycle it's hard to imagine how he's going to top this. To a large degree this is much less of a deranged trip mostly for the hell of it and more of a memoir taking stock of a life spent in the shadow of the Cold War and a revisit of how the immediate hopes that emerged in the wake of that conflict have been realized; or not. By the time Moore is done with this trip he's nodding in agreement with Vaclav Havel's belief that it's going to take several generations for the impacted societies to really recover from the whole sorry affair. If there is an issue with this book as an entertainment it's that it peaks early with Moore's misadventures in Finland, in March, north of the Arctic Circle; good times.½

Synopsis: Tim did not outgrow his childhood obsession with Monopoly, leading him to consider how far he could take his obsession. So, Tim goes on an adventure around London, visiting the places and streets (and even jails!) that are mentioned in the famous game of Monopoly.
My Opinion: A very informative travelogue of London. Monopoly was created in 1936, and there are often comparisons from London today to how it would have been back then. Having been to London myself, it was nice when he visited places I was familiar with. I found the writing style a little bit jumpy - obviously this is an adventure around London but sometimes it was just information overload.

I've been a fan of Moore since the "Frost on my mustache" days and knew I would be in for a humorous time reading "Spanish Steps", and I was right.

Moore takes a donkey named Shinto for a trek along the Santiago Compostella, the famous pilgrim trek across Spain. While we hope that Shinto wasn't mistreated, we get a history of the trek, the area and we meet the fellow pilgrims making their way to Santiago, including an Australian who, completely unsurprisingly, drank a lot.

What was humorous about this book (putting a middle-aged, middle class Brit on a shoddy bicycle across eastern Europe) was also its downfall. The author appeared to see very little beyond tower blocks, forests, stray dogs and the stares of the locals. At points it felt like the author had nothing but pity, annoyance, fear and amusement towards the citizens of the countries he was travelling through, yet made no effort to get to grips with the historical experience, language, culture or to see the beauty of the place.½

Having been to a fair few miserable places in Britain it was good to have Moore around to back up my beliefs. Moore, whose "Frost on my Moustache" is my favorite travelogue, travels around to all the worst places in Britain, staying at the worst hotels and trying all the worst experiences. He sometimes has fun despite this, including singing along to "Aga Doo".

My only complaint would be that the final section of "You are Awful ..." is very rushed and Moore even admits he basically gave up on writing the last 50 or so pages. Still, worth a read for its odd chuckle.

Moore combines an account of his own journey over the 2000 Tour de France route with reflections on the Tour and Tour riders, France (mostly) and Switzerland (a bit), and a lot of pain and suffering. His achievement, if it is to be believed, is not insignificant but it isn't lauded much on the page. Instead his wry and deprecating humour drives the reader's journey, and a very enjoyable journey it is. 1 Jan 2018.

Cycling insanity through snow, ice, angry villagers, drunken drivers, award worthy pot holes, language failures, dark ruins, mad dogs, hunger and extreme physical exhaustion. Insane it might have been, but it was the best non trip I’ve taken. The historical knowledge and visions were better than any history class I’ve attended. The reality of the aftermath of the communist cold war is not something I had ever even thought of before. The best part, I didn't get a sore bum riding the trail.

This was my first Tim More adventure and it will not be my last. This was a dark trip through history, there is little light to be found in that history. Mr Moore brought some lightness with his brisk humor and honesty. His observations are not something I think I would notice on a trip, I enjoyed his views very much. I would suggest reading this while googling the places to see the landscape he traveled it is amazing,

My only two complaints about this book are that I found it a bit difficult to keep all the pilgrims he met straight and I was slightly disappointed that there were no pictures of his trip included in the book, seeing as he mentioned within the book several memorable pictures that he took. I particularly wanted to see him and Shinto together. Otherwise, I thought it was hilarious and very well-written.

Tim Moore is a little obnoxious. The best way I found to deal with him is to think of him as another Bill Bryson. Turns out that's what everyone is supposed to think, thanks to the dust jacket and other review. What makes Moore different from Bryson is that his obnoxiousness is on another level and his humor is much edgier. He's a bit more condescending and sarcastic, using words like ridiculous, unspectacular and disgusting to describe his surroundings during his adventures. But, that's not my main gripe with Moore. I want to know more about why he chose to follow Coryate's journey and what he hoped to get out of it along the way. After all, he wasn't following Coryate literally. True, Coryate was mostly on foot while Moore was insistent in having the perfect, attention-drawing touring car, a Rolls Royce. True, Coryate didn't wear a plush purple suit to further draw attention to himself either. According to the dust jacket I was to expect "snorts of laughter" while reading The Grand Tour. Unfortunately, none came for me. A great deal of the time my mind wandered while trying to read Grand Tour.

Growing up in Australia my knowledge of London was all-but restricted to the Monopoly board. Thus, I knew that Mayfair and Park Lane were out of my price range if I ever moved to London, I learnt how to pronounce "Pall Mall", I knew to avoid Old Kent Road and above all I wondered what on earth "The Angel, Islingdon" was (spoiler alert; it's a building that currently hosts a pub and bank).

If "Don't Pass Go" was around in the late seventies/early eighties it would have saved a lot of wondering on my behalf. Moore does a bang-up job filling in our knowledge of each of the Monopoly, giving context as to why a particular street or location was chosen and supplying the odd dab of self-depreciating humour to keep it rolling.

Of course, when I finally got to London a few decades after first encountering it on the Monopoly board, it didn't seem to have the same magic that the board game instilled in me. That's not Moore's fault though.

This was an ok read - skim through the slack bits. In all it gets a bit depressing to have someone deliberately describe all the bits of England that are probablyt best avoided.½

A generally witty account of a man coming to grips with the seedier aspects of the sport that he loves while at the same time doing something very hard to get to grips with his sense of mid-life crisis. Having not read any of Moore's earlier books I can't say how it stacks up against those stories but I enjoyed this one well enough. There is the Chekovian element of suspense in that one wonders for the duration of the book whether the warnings about the dodgy structural integrity of the vintage bike that Moore is attempting his adventure on come to pass.½

Only the drunk, mad or those in search of a topic would cycle the Tour de France with no prior training. Moore fits into, at least, the third category.

So Moore greases up the bicycle, almost gets himself killed before leaving London, and rides the Tour de France, mountains and all. Moore has always been one for self-deprecating remarks so it's hard to tell how much is exaggeration and how much is indeed Moore incredibly out of his depth and near death in the Alps. Whatever the case, a good laugh is the result.

Tim Moore has become the doyen of that specialist subgenre of the travel writing industry; come up with some novelty stunt and then record what such a prat you are while travelling. In this case, it's following the tracks of Thomas Coryate's (the man who invented the word "umbrella") seventeenth century odyssey, while in a vintage Rolls Royce and a velvet suit.

What follows includes much mirth (some urine-related) as Moore makes his way around Europe while giving us the low down on Coryate. While you can't help but be impressed with Coryate's intestinal fortitude travelling around Europe the hard way, at times you just wanted him to shut up and not antagonises just about everyone he meets (including the King, who asked "Does that fool still live?") Of course, I also seem to antagonise everyone I meet in my travel so I can identify with Mr Coryate.

Not Moore's best work but still worth a read.