Product Description

Battling it out with the old men on butchers' bikes across the plains of Aquitaine and pursued by cattle over Europe's second highest road, Moore soon finds himself resorting to narcotic assistance, systematic overeating and waxed legs before summoning a support vehicle staffed by cruelly sceptical family and friends. Accounts of his suffering and chicanery, and those encountered in the race's epic history, are interwoven through a look at rural France busy tarting itself up for those 15 seconds of fame as the Tour careers through at 50kph. An heroic depiction of an inadequate man's attempt to achieve the unachievable, Moore's Tour is a tale of calorific excess, ludicrous clothing and intimate discomfort.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #11246 in Books
• Published on: 2002-06-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Comic writer Tim Moore trades his ailing Rolls Royce for a bicycle, a map and a water bottle in French Revolutions. This is a quest to pedal the route of the Tour de France, no mean feat for the fit, let alone a self-described suburban slouch. The resulting 2,256-haphazard-mile journey transforms Moore into an incredibly fit and passionately proud cyclist. Initially, Moore takes the "I will do it and it probably will kill me" approach. His normal perspective, as a stooge to life's misfortunes, plays well as he prepares to ride the route of the 2000 Tour de France. Moore is the everyman who pedalled in youth and now wouldn't ride a bike to the corner store. But unlike a traveller by car, train or plane, Moore has to navigate France under his own steam. Somewhere around the Ventoux, the world's windiest place, Moore starts to change. He becomes enraptured by the feat itself as mile by mile he realises he is no longer an accidental cyclist but a lean, mean cycling machine. Gradually, the narrative turns from travel to a personal quest. Along the route, Moore's details of the heroes of the Tour make an excellent primer on this gruelling race and helps the uninitiated understand the frenzy that grips France each July as the races meanders through incidental villages, over mountains and, finally, into Paris. It is worth reading for that alone. Having survived mountains of pain, a disgusting diet and motels of dubious value, a new, muscular Moore concludes that "I might never leave my mark on the Tour, but that didn't matter. It has left its mark on me". To follow Moore's path of perspiration is certainly not a vacation. Yet, this curmudgeonly clever and inspirational book makes one want to do just that. "Old Father Time was catching up with Old Father Tim. If I didn't do it this year, I wouldn't because maybe next year I couldn't," he says before starting out. And that, as Tim Moore so surely points out, is what pushes any true traveller out the door. --Kathleen Buckley

Daily Express, 23 June, 2001
The book's comic effect should not be underestimated: it is embarrassingly laugh-out-loud.

The Sunday Times, 8 July 2001
...this makes for one of the funniest books about sport ever written... his self-justifications are comic works of art.

Customer Reviews

Warning: do not read in public
As a keen cyclist (well, 50 miles a week) and a huge Tour de France fan, I was looking forward to this as a substitute for Channel 4's absent coverage of the race this year. What I didn't expect was that as well as being an informative, inspirational and - yes - moving account of a splendidly hopeless amateur's attempt to "do the Tour", French Revolutions would also turn out to be perhaps the funniest book I've ever read. My wife banned me from reading it in bed because I kept her awake with my helpless giggling, and reading it on a crowded train one morning was a BIG mistake.

not the techy drivel I was expecting
Having run out of books on holiday i picked up my father's copy of 'French Revolutions'. I expected any book my dad owned to be heavily detailed on group sets and bottom brackets, and of little intest to the casual cyclist. How wrong was I. You don't need to know anything about the tour, the book is laugh out loud funny, unputdownable. The acheivement of any man who can ride this incredable race is hammered home, there is no sporting acheivement on earth like this one. However what really makes the book good is the way it draws in the reader, everyone's had the 5year old in the park experience of riding, but few can express it as hilariously as Tim Moore. The book is packed with dry humour and an author people can relate to, 'French Revolutions' has to be in my top ten of books. Go out - Buy it!

I think this is the funniest book I've ever read
I laughed out loud more times than I can count. Could be a seriously embarrassing book to take on a plane or train journey, unless you don't care about disturbing your fellow travellers with your chortles.
The book is about a journalist's journey around the route of the Tour De France, taking in most of the stages covered by the professionals, a couple of months before the race itself.
Moore is a very engaging writer, and very open about his (rather pathetic) need to identify with past and present Tour De France heroes - even though he's new to cycling, in his late thirties, and not (at the start of the book) particularly fit.
Probably you'll understand and relate to the book best if you're a follower of the Tour (expecially the Phil Liggett/Paul Sherwen combo on Channel 4/ITV), or a keen cyclist, or both.
Reminiscent of early Bill Bryson, I thought - but (for me) much funnier.