Rating: 
Summary: remarkable values
Review: I was a high school miler at the time of the breaching of the four minute barrier. I watched Wes Santee run indoors in Boston at the Knights of Columbus meet in the old Boston Garden. I saw the Movietone newsreel of Bannister running the four minute mile with my little brother at the Paramount Theater in Newton,Ma. right after the cartoons and right before the serials. And, I remember it inspired me to one of my best indoor performances ever when I broke four minutes and fifty seconds at the smokey, rather shabby, twelve laps to the mile West Newton Street Armory in a poor section of Boston when Newton for the first time bested the great black Rindge track team to win the Class A indoor track and field title. This book brought these men, their stories, lives,achievements against all odds, and the era, back to life so vividly that I recalled and relived times I thought I had completely forgotten. It is hard for younger generations to imagine the incredible effort these men put forward while pursuing college(Santee), medical school(Bannister) and graduate school (Landy)careers, but most of all to imagine that they did it for the love of their sport and NO MONEY. Wes Santee was, in fact, barred from international competition because he was brazen enought to lose his temper with a German track official who reneged on his promise to give Santee an Agfa camera if he competed in a German meet. A great book!
Rating: 
Summary: This is no Seabiscuit!
Review: I was very disappointed. While the book is well written, it is less than compelling to read about countless races (each essentially the same as the others) in which the 4 minute mile is once again NOT broken. The drama and thrill of broken lives, redemption, setbacks and heartbreak and ultimate victory that one found in Seabiscuit are just not there. There is simply not much of a story to recount.
Rating:
Summary: Read it before the movie comes out!
Review: I've become obsessed with biographies of late, and picked this up as I thought it would be interesting to read about Sir Roger Bannister, one of sport's 20th century heroes. First of all, this is not a biography: it's a carefully paced, dramatic thriller of the first order. It's not just about Bannister, although the portrait of Bannister is complete and obviously pain-stakingly researched, but about a worldwide effort driven by nationalism, amateur ideals, rising professional interests in sport, and the sheer will of these three determined, incredible men to achieve the "mt. everest of sport". I literally could not put this book down for 2 days straight. I loved all of them and wanted so desperately for them to WIN! There is heartbreak and joy in this book -- a read of the first order.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant Evocation of a Sports Era
Review: It's a story of epic granduer at the center of sports endeavor. Neal Bascomb evokes the attitudes of a time when amatuer sports had high purpose and purity, and the meaning of competition resonated the excellence of individual achievement and national ideals. Bascomb drives the narrative with remarkable skill, revealing the tension, irony, bitter disappointment, and eventual triumph of Roger Bannister, and examines lengths talented competitors will go to test themselves against an idea for the sake of the idea itself. This book should be requiired reading for anyone who wants to know what it takes to be a champion. Bascomb brings back a great era.
Rating:
Summary: Seabiscuit meets Chariots of Fire
Review: May 6, 1954. On that day a half-century ago the 4-minute mile was finally, irrevocably broken. They said it couldn't be done, that it was beyond the scope of human endurance. Even as the 20th century wound down, this penultimate event was treated with a hallowed reverence; Sports Illustrated chose the 4-minute mile--the perfect mile--as The Greatest Sporting Achievement of the Century.On the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of the perfect mile, and with the Summer Olympic Games in Athens only weeks away, THE PERFECT MILE by Neil Bascomb couldn't be any timelier. And with the movie adaptation of THE PERFECT MILE currently in production with Universal, Spyglass--the same studio that produced a little movie called SEABISCUIT--expect this book to have a loooooong shelf life. Speaking of SEABISCUIT, Neil Bascomb has a charismatic narrative voice not unlike Laura Hillenbrand's. In THE PERFECT MILE, he weaves together the biographies of three amazing and strikingly different athletes--Bannister, the Oxford-educated amateur sports-for-sports-sake archetype with his come-from-behind running style; Landy, the Aussie with the unorthodox training methods, and a relentless wire-to-wire front runner; and lastly Santee, the American, a tough Kansas-born farmer's son that history forgot. Three men, one quest: The Perfect Mile. READ THIS BOOK, PEOPLE!!!
Rating: 
Summary: Tedious
Review: Music and sport are two exhilarating aspects of life that often fall flat when spun out to book-length treatment. While I've read many good essays and magazine articles on both, there are few books about either that manage to capture what is is so viscerally thrilling about each. Another common pitfall of music and sports writing is the descent into minutiae that moves the topic from the realm of the general reading into the navel-gazing inner circle of the enthusiast. So, although I can read thousands of pages about my favorite band or book after book about the intersection of culture, politics, and soccer, I certainly don't expect the average person to share either enthusiasm. All of which is a roundabout preface to my reaction to this particular book, which was largely boredom.
The quest for the four-minute mile is certainly a worthy topic for sports historians to cover, there's no doubt about that. And I'm not ill disposed to tales of running, in fact, I ran cross-country (badly) in college. When I started the book, the contrast between the three subjects, Bannister, Landy, and Santee made me hopeful. But the more I read, the more thin it all seemed--like a magazine article expanded to its limits. We get the full backgrounds of each man and the paths that took them to competitive running--montages that come across as sappy and read as if they were treatments for a TV movie. Alternating between the three men, Bascomb shows the buildup to and disaster of the '52 Helsinki Olympics, which are portrayed rather choppily. Then there is endless detail of training regimens, diets, and so forth, which gets tedious very quickly. So tedious, in fact, that after making my way through a third of the book, I returned it to the library. Ultimately, I ceased to care about the micro-details and politicking involved, and I never got a sense of the exhilaration of the actual running.
Rating:
Summary: A Thrilling Account of Breaking the Big Barrier
Review: Our systems of measurements are arbitrary; a mile is an artificial distance, and a minute is an artificial time. But everyone has heard the phrase "the four minute mile." It might be arbitrary, but as a footrace there is also some symmetry to it. Four minutes, four times around the quarter mile track, a strict fifteen miles per hour. For years, the four minute mile was a monument as an impenetrable barrier, and when Roger Bannister broke the barrier fifty years ago, the whole world took notice. It was Bannister's victory, of course, and often he was depicted as a lone athlete out to break the record, but there is more to the story. In _The Perfect Mile: Three Athletes, One Goal, and Less than Four Minutes to Achieve It_ (Houghton Mifflin), Neal Bascomb gives a full and exciting history of events leading to one of the most impressive accomplishments in sports. Necessarily, the other two runners, Australian John Landy and American Wes Santee are mere also-rans, but their efforts were heroic, and as Bascomb makes clear, there may have been only matters of happenstance, like weather, that kept them from being first. Like Bannister, they had failed to get medals in the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, and returned home determined to take the four minute mile upon their return home. Bannister was restricted by his medical studies; he could not train for hours every day, as the others did, so he had to concentrate his training into exhausting short daily bursts. His medical background helped, however, in researching the effects of exercise, giving him scientific assurance he could do it. On 6 May 1954 Bannister made a real try at the barrier. He had, by that time, taken on a coach, and he had two friends to serve as pacemakers. The breaking of the record was a worldwide sensation. It is not, however, the perfect mile of the title. Even the jubilant British press questioned just how cricket it was to use pacemakers and not sheer competition, and the three aspirants in the quest had never run against each other. The three were scheduled to run in the Empire games in Vancouver three months after Bannister's epochal run, which would satisfy everyone as to who was the fastest miler. The only pacemakers would be the runners themselves. There were heartbreaking complications that prevented Santee from running; they had to do with US athletic authorities who persecuted and banned him because he allegedly breached his amateur status. Both Bannister and Landy did under four minutes in Vancouver in an exciting race, thrillingly described here. This was a classic victory. There was no hint of doping, television did not make it into an extravaganza, and the competitors were not millionaires. The result made front page headlines all over the world; what subsequent footrace has done that? _The Perfect Mile_ thus takes us back to a simpler time, but this is a welcome story of timeless heroes.
Rating:
Summary: A Thrilling Account of Breaking the Big Barrier
Review: Our systems of measurements are arbitrary; a mile is an artificial distance, and a minute is an artificial time. But everyone has heard the phrase "the four minute mile." It might be arbitrary, but as a footrace there is also some symmetry to it. Four minutes, four times around the quarter mile track, a strict fifteen miles per hour. For years, the four minute mile was a monument as an impenetrable barrier, and when Roger Bannister broke the barrier fifty years ago, the whole world took notice. It was Bannister's victory, of course, and often he was depicted as a lone athlete out to break the record, but there is more to the story. In _The Perfect Mile: Three Athletes, One Goal, and Less than Four Minutes to Achieve It_ (Houghton Mifflin), Neal Bascomb gives a full and exciting history of events leading to one of the most impressive accomplishments in sports. Necessarily, the other two runners, Australian John Landy and American Wes Santee are mere also-rans, but their efforts were heroic, and as Bascomb makes clear, there may have been only matters of happenstance, like weather, that kept them from being first. Like Bannister, they had failed to get medals in the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, and returned home determined to take the four minute mile upon their return home. Bannister was restricted by his medical studies; he could not train for hours every day, as the others did, so he had to concentrate his training into exhausting short daily bursts. His medical background helped, however, in researching the effects of exercise, giving him scientific assurance he could do it. On 6 May 1954 Bannister made a real try at the barrier. He had, by that time, taken on a coach, and he had two friends to serve as pacemakers. The breaking of the record was a worldwide sensation. It is not, however, the perfect mile of the title. Even the jubilant British press questioned just how cricket it was to use pacemakers and not sheer competition, and the three aspirants in the quest had never run against each other. The three were scheduled to run in the Empire games in Vancouver three months after Bannister's epochal run, which would satisfy everyone as to who was the fastest miler. The only pacemakers would be the runners themselves. There were heartbreaking complications that prevented Santee from running; they had to do with US athletic authorities who persecuted and banned him because he allegedly breached his amateur status. Both Bannister and Landy did under four minutes in Vancouver in an exciting race, thrillingly described here. This was a classic victory. There was no hint of doping, television did not make it into an extravaganza, and the competitors were not millionaires. The result made front page headlines all over the world; what subsequent footrace has done that? _The Perfect Mile_ thus takes us back to a simpler time, but this is a welcome story of timeless heroes.
Rating:
Summary: Close enough to perfect
Review: Picking up the book I already knew who was the first person to break the 4 minute mile barrier. I was also vaguely aware that an American, Australian and Englishman were all challenging for it. The intense backgrounds and thoughts of the three that are provided are not what makes this book so wonderful. The book is written so well that until the tape is broken in any race you don't know the result. Unless you know the exact history of this herculean effort the reader doesn't know when the barrier will be broken and when world records are set. Reading this book I was actually feeling the excitment and tension of the races and the shear exhaustion that hit them, but didn't stop them until crossing the finish line. I felt the extreme disappointment when once again heart and soul was poured into a race and it just wasn't good enough. None of the three ever competed against each other in the mile until after the barrier was broken. There was a first, but in the head to head race that eventually happens who will be best? These three men where truly extrodinary and I was rivetted from start to finish.
Rating:
Summary: Three Athletes and an Impossible Goal
Review: Sub-Title: Three Athletes, One Goal, and Less Than Four Minutes to Achieve It.
It's hard to believe that it's been fifty years since Roger Bannister ran the mile in less than four minutes. It was considered impossible. But he did it.
Today, advances in nutrition science and technology have allowed more than 2,000 runners to finish under four minutes. Amby Burfoot, the 1968 Boston Marathon champion and Runner's World executive editor, describes the difference in athletes today as being full-time professional runners who make hundreds of thousands of dollars compared to Bannister, who was a medical student who enjoyed running.
"Today's athletes run five to eight times as many miles a week as Bannister probably did," said Burfoot. "They also avail themselves to a team of nutritionists, sports psychologists and exercise physiologists who analyze their breathing and muscle fiber." As a result they have cut fifteen seconds off of Bannister's time.
This book is not on these modern runners, it's about doing the impossible. It's the story of three people: Roger Bannister, John Landy and Wes Santee who set out to do this impossible task. Written with a great deal of access to all three men, this is a supurb book that should make all three the heros they deserve to be.
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