FOR RELEASE: April 1, 1999
Contact: Franklin Crawford Office: (607) 255-9737 E-Mail: [email protected] Compuserve: Bill Steele, 72650,565 http://www.news.cornell.edu
ITHACA, N.Y. -- Sometimes a mid-life crisis can teach a man how to keep both oars in the water for the rest of his life.
Barry Strauss was 40 when he became obsessed with sculling after a summer rowing course at the Cascadilla Boat Club in Ithaca. Unlike his other short-lived mid-life diversions -- yoga, saxophone lessons and fly fishing among them -- rowing captured Strauss' imagination and summoned the born-again will of an inner jock who'd never gotten to fully flex his muscles. Strauss, a Cornell professor of history and classics and director of the university's Peace Studies Program, threw himself into the difficult new sport and then wrote a book about it. Rowing Against the Current: On Learning to Scull at Forty (Scribner, $20 hard cover) is a memoir that navigates through mid-life rites of passage as it meditates on the techniques and history of rowing.
"It was not a case of love at first sight," Strauss writes in his introduction. "Rowing was a tough sport and I was not a natural ... I kept on rowing, rather, because I love being on the water and because the oars spoke."
Strauss translates the voice of those oars into a testimony to the fact that life can indeed begin at 40. Albeit with limits. Among advance praises for the book is a Kirkus review stating that "the author's enthusiasm is infectious ... Strauss has tapped into something special out there in his scull. He does fine service to his sport in this memoir."
Strauss, now 45, is currently on sabbatic from Cornell as a Rockefeller Visiting Fellow at Princeton University's Center for Human Values. He finished the manuscript for Rowing Against the Current a year ago.
Since then, Strauss has learned more about rowing techniques and has met some other "over-the-hill rowers" whose stories he'd like to share. Like the 60-something Cornell alum at the Princeton rowing club "who sings the Cornell Crew Song on request and broke the world's record in his ergometer-race category, " Strauss said.
But the absence of these elements from his memoir has not diminished the sweetness of its publication, he added, saying, "I'm very happy with the book. Scribner's did a terrific job of design and production."
Strauss is the author of numerous scholarly papers and reviews as well as the following books: The Anatomy of Error: The Lessons of Ancient Military Disasters for Modern Strategists, co-author (St. Martin's Press 1990, paperback 1992); Western Civilization: The Continuing Experiment, co-author (Houghton Mifflin 1994, 2nd edition 1998); Fathers and Sons in Athens: Ideology and Society in the Era of the Peloponnesian War (Princeton University Press 1993, paperback 1996); Hegemonic Rivalry from Thucydides to the Nuclear Age, co-editor (Westview Press, 1991); Athens After the Peloponnesian War: Class, Faction and Policy 403-386 B.C., (Cornell University Press, 1987).
In Rowing Against the Current, Strauss also mentions a novel that suffered several rejections, adding to the unsolicited pangs of mortality that grip the aging male ego. The novel went the way of the Buddhist mantras Strauss had been reciting.
"I got tired of sending the novel out for rejection or advice for revision," he said. "I outgrew the characters, and in the final analysis, I'm happier writing non-fiction."
He is currently writing a new book, A Family Made by War: One Family's Twentieth Century, which follows the thread of military experience through three generations in his family from Poland to America to Israel.
Strauss' current research focuses on military strategy and history, the ethics of citizenship and family history. These subjects -- and a chapter in Rowing Against the Current devoted to the galleys of the classical Athenian navy -- more than hint at the intellectual preoccupations working on Strauss when he undertook the sport of rowing. But how does a 40-year-old body more accustomed to bending over books, learn to lean into the oars of a single scull?
"I was in decent shape when I started rowing but nothing special, health club two to three times a week," he said. "But if you get serious about it, then, watch out, training circuit here I come."
A year of Tae Kwon Do along the way helped put Strauss in touch with proper body mechanics. Once or twice a year he goes to sculling clinics to get coaching and feedback.
"Coaching is key, especially coaching from someone attuned to the issues of the middle-aged amateur. With an 18-year-old a coach can say "do this!" and the body responds. With a 40-year-old, a coach has got to be cagey and even trick the body, asking it to do 'x' in order to build up to the point where it can do 'y'."
Whatever the equation, Strauss' enthusiasm figured significantly in his becoming a competent rower. As his memoir shows, he grabbed his mid-life crisis with both hands and while facing one direction, rowed in the other. You might say he's backed into the future.
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