Le Tour: A History of the Tour de France, 1903-2003 Book

A dull and tedious book that fails to capture the cultural and historical richness of the Tour de France. It has its better parts but mostly one is left treading water in a sea of chronologically ordered facts with little context. The attempts to place the race in French culture and history are faint and awkwardly disconnected. The book is strewn with feeble attempts to add color, but these "side streets" generally prove to be irrelevant and pointless detours. For instance, when the author attempts to frame the race route through southern France he merely gives a laundry list of all the 20th century (English) literary greats that have made there home there. Really? What does this have to do with The Tour passing through Provence? What about the multitude of people than line the route and the countless individuals and towns that play a roll in the tour? And what about the roads, the weather, the terrain, the machines? Surely the author has spent little time on a bike for this narrative is devoid of the most basic experiences of cycling and seems borne more out of cold newspaper research than a passion for the sport.