Book Review: Again to Carthage
John Parker Jr. returns to the world of Cassidy and Bruce, this time bringing the old runner out of retirement for one last chance at the Olympics. And by old I mean in his late 20's.
As opposed to the first book, which had a heavier focus on running and the pure pursuit of achieving something great. This book was more about recapturing the emotions and feelings of striving for perfection. It introduced death and brought back the words from the first book, Once a Runner. In that book, the advice given is that "One should attempt to run through most of those other little hubcaps life rolls into your lane; everything from death in the family to cancer of the colon. Running as Therapy But that book was also fiction, so Mark Wetmore gave actual advice in Running with the Buffaloes. "Every day following Severy's death, Wetmore did what he recommended his athlete's do: He ran" More than anything - the running, work, love - the book was about finding your limit. It is about pushing yourself to achieve something and to find out what your wall is. That is the achievement in-of-itself. It's doing something for the sake of doing it, not for the reward of the activity. So it was in those closing miles of the marathon that Cassidy trained his entire life for that he finally found his finish line. And at that moment, he knew he could move on with his life because he ran to the edge, faced the demons, and befriended them.
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