Search - A Dog in a Hat: An American Bike Racer's Story of Mud, Drugs, Blood, Betrayal, and Beauty in Belgium

Good story of bike racing as done in Europe

4.0 out of 5 stars An Excellent Sports Memoir, August 19, 2008
By S. Michael Wilson (Phillipsburg, NJ) - See all my reviews
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Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
More often than not, sports memoirs usually fall into two major categories; tell-all scandal sheets designed to sell copies through controversy, and lengthy life stories heavily padded with dull and unneeded information.

Joe Parkin's biking memoir does not fall into either of these camps. In A Dog in a Hat, Parkin chronicles the years he spent training and racing in Belgium during the late eighties with brevity and candor, giving the reader plenty of breathing room to enjoy the behind the scenes look at professional bike racing.

Perkin's memoir is about more than just racing. It is a look at the adventures and journeys of an ambitious young man immersing himself in unfamiliar cultures and customs, not only in the intense world of professional team bike racing, but also the foreign land and people that for a short while became his adopted home and family.

Never bitter or overly dramatic, A Dog in a Hat is a professional athlete's fond recollection of a period in his life filled with the experiences and decisions - both good and bad - that not only define the development of an athletic career, but of one man's life journey.

Even if you are not into professional bike racing, A Dog in a Hat is a sports memoir that will amuse, inspire, and entertain.