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    Step by Step: A Pedestrian Memoir
    Step by Step: A Pedestrian Memoir
    Step by Step: A Pedestrian Memoir
    Ebook416 pages7 hours

    Step by Step: A Pedestrian Memoir

    By Lawrence Block

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    About this ebook

    From the revered New York Times bestselling author comes a touching, insightful, and humorous memoir of an unlikely racewalker and world traveler

    Before Lawrence Block was the author of bestselling novels featuring unforgettable characters such as the hit man Keller, private investigator Matthew Scudder, burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr, and time traveler Evan Tanner, he was a walker.

    As a child, he walked home from school (mostly because he couldn't ride a bike). As a col-lege student, he walked until he was able to buy his first car (a deep blue 1950 Chevrolet coupe named Pamela, after the Samuel Richardson novel). As an adult, he ran marathons until he discovered what would become a lifelong obsession—never mind if some people didn't think it was a real sport—racewalking.

    By that time Block had already spent plenty of time walking through the city of New York. But racewalking ended up taking him all over the country, from New Orleans to Anchorage, from marathons in the punishing heat to marathons in the pouring rain. And along the way, as he began to pen the books that would make him a household name among suspense fans all over the world, he found that in life, as in writing, you just need to take one step after the other.

    Through the lens of his adventures while walking—in twenty-four-hour races, on a pilgrimage through Spain, and just about everywhere you can imagine—Lawrence Block shares his heartwarming personal story about life's trials and tribulations, discomforts and successes, which truly lets readers walk a mile in the master of mystery's shoes.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateMay 19, 2009
    ISBN9780061877155
    Step by Step: A Pedestrian Memoir
    Author

    Lawrence Block

    Lawrence Block has been writing award-winning mystery and suspense fiction for half a century. His newest book, pitched by his Hollywood agent as “James M. Cain on Viagra,” is The Girl with the Deep Blue Eyes. His other recent novels include The Burglar Who Counted The Spoons, featuring Bernie Rhodenbarr; Hit Me, featuring philatelist and assassin Keller; and A Drop Of The Hard Stuff, featuring Matthew Scudder, brilliantly embodied by Liam Neeson in the new film, A Walk Among The Tombstones.  Several of his other books have also been filmed, although not terribly well.  He's well known for his books for writers, including the classic Telling Lies For Fun & Profit and Write For Your Life, and has just published a collection of his writings about the mystery genre and its practitioners, The Crime Of Our Lives.  In addition to prose works, he has written episodic television (Tilt!) And the Wong Kar-wai film, My Blueberry Nights.  He is a modest and humble fellow, although you would never guess as much from this biographical note.

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    • 4/5
      Anyone calling himself a serious mystery fan probably owns at least a handful of Lawrence Block books. Block is best known for his Matt Scudder series, of course, but he has also had success with a mystery series featuring burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr. This time around, though, Block offers a memoir focusing on his years of as a competitive racewalker (competitive only in the sense that Block competed against himself to improve his own previous distance and time records).While many of Block’s readers will have used running and walking as favored forms of exercise, few of them are likely to have taken those sports to the level described in “Step by Step: A Pedestrian Memoir.” Shortly after he gave up drinking, Block surprised himself by taking up jogging as an outlet but he soon concluded that jogging just for the sake of jogging made little sense to him. Rather, he came to feel that he was in training for something specific: a race against the clock and himself. In 1981, well into his forties and by then having switched from running to racewalking, Block finished 40 races, five marathons among them.Then he stopped – and for 22 years he did not enter another race. But, living in New York, Block never completely stopped walking and he even devotes a portion of Step by Step to the three months in 1991 he spent on the 650-mile pilgrimage over the Spanish Pyrenees he shared with his wife. Block is a compulsive man, and when he took up racewalking again after the turn of the century he picked up right where he left off two decades earlier – and then some. No longer content with a mere handful of marathons per year, he was soon competing in “ultras,” races of at least 24-hour duration during which runners and walkers completed as many miles as possible. The world of competitive racewalking Block describes is an interesting one, and anyone familiar with “fun runs” will easily identify with the aches and pains he has to overcome in order to get himself to so many starting lines. However, the most memorable part of the book is Block’s frank take on his reaction to the aging process when, try as he might, he could no longer set “personal bests” in the events he entered. The realization that time would make no exception in his case threw him into a depression so deep that he lost not only the desire to racewalk, but maybe even the desire to write again.Although “Step by Step” is autobiographical, it is not long on details, something the more rabid fans of Lawrence Block will regret. No one, however, can quarrel with the frank way that Block describes his addictions, his compulsive personality, and his personal battle with a crippling bout of depression seemingly triggered by the aging process. Lawrence Block has a life’s work to be proud of whether or not he ever writes another word. If he decides to take Matt Scudder and Bernie Rhodenbarr into a well-earned retirement with him, he can look back in pride. After all, life is a road best covered step by step.Rated at: 4.0

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    Step by Step - Lawrence Block

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