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Minneapolis author and former pro cyclist Joe Parkin will celebrate the launch of his new book at One on One Bicycle Studio in Minneapolis on Saturday, September 6th at 7:00 p.m. This is a free event with Belgian refreshments provided. According to the press release:
Parkin’s new book is A Dog in a Hat: An American Bike Racer’s Story of Mud, Drugs, Blood, Betrayal, and Beauty in Belgium. The book is a memoir of Parkin’s experience as one of the first Americans to race bikes professionally in Europe. The book is now available in bookstores, bike shops, and online. Parkin will autograph copies during the event.
In 1987, Joe Parkin was an amateur bike racer in California when he ran into Bob Roll, a pro on the powerhouse Team 7-Eleven. “Lobotomy Bob” told Parkin to go to Belgium to become a pro bike racer. Riding along a canal in Belgium years later, Roll encountered Parkin, who he describes in the book’s foreword as “a wraith, an avenging angel of misery, a twelve-toothed assassin”. Roll barely recognized him; Belgium had forged Parkin into a pro, and changed him forever.
A Dog in a Hat is Joe’s remarkable story. In plainspoken, fast-paced prose, Parkin describes the true life of the professional bike racer, putting the reader into the whirlwind of this hardest of athletic educations. A Dog in a Hat begins with Parkin’s terrifying first visit to his team doctor, where he is strapped to a table and monitored by humming electrodes as men in white lab coats coldly divine his future as a pro.
I read this book. It isn’t bad. It isn’t great though either. The content is good; the writing isn’t the best. The author just isn’t a professional writer. A “ghost-writer” would have been an asset.