Racing Odysseus: A College President Becomes a Freshman Again Book

I love quirky memoirs about people taking on a possibly-ridiculous adventure. Couple that with my ongoing fascination with St. John's and its Great Books program (the college counselor back at my high school told me to apply, but I didn't), and this book seemed tailor-made for me.

Alas, it was disappointing. After surviving a dramatic battle with metastatic melanoma, Martin decides to take a sabbatical from his position as College President at Randolph-Macon and enroll at St. John's as a freshman. From the beginning, he shares that his plan is to write a book about the experience.

The trouble is that it's not clear what experience he was trying to have. He isn't truly a freshman, even a 61-year-old freshman, and that fact complicates matters. He goes in knowing that he is only sampling St. John's, enrolling for a single semester, not pursuing a degree. He refrains from participating in the freshman Seminar, instead observing and taking notes as the other students discuss the material. He visits the science lab once, never explaining why he wasn't actually taking the science course. He misses out completely on the required freshman chorus. He tries to befriend his classmates, but - like any participant-observer - can never really become one of them. Quite a lot of the book is taken up with his experiences on Crew, which seems to be more about achieving a later-life Moment of Glory than about athletics enriching his (and his classmates') more traditionally-academic pursuits.

The meandering narrative is not particularly engaging, and I was left wondering at the end just what the point of the whole thing was after all.