Step by Step

June 1, 2009
Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Block has been writing for more than 50 years and walking slightly longer, according to this memoir notable for frequent flashes of the author's keen wit. In the introduction, he accurately and honestly advises the reader that the book is as "every bit as self-indulgent as it wanted to be." Block goes on to provide lengthy details of his various forms of ambulation, from long solo walks as a seventh grader to a walk across Spain to Santiago de Campostela. Mostly he recounts his experiences as a runner and a racewalker in races ranging from 5Ks to marathons and 24-hour races. Runners or walkers will enjoy Block's accounts of his trials and triumphs, including a strange hiatus of more than 22 years. (Block was in his 40s when he stopped racing and in his 60s when he resumed walking marathons.) Mystery fans, unless they're Block completists or running enthusiasts themselves, may want to take a pass.

May 1, 2009
The prolific crime novelist (Hit and Run, 2008, etc.) writes about his adventures as a racewalker.

The author's focus at first seems puzzling. Block chooses not to tell the story of his writing life—a project he began but abandoned after weeks of feverish writing—or his personal life ("if you wanted to know something about me, well, too bad"). Instead, the memoir focuses almost entirely on his distance walking. Generally these walks are competitive—marathons and 24-hour walks in which the globetrotting Block consistently ignores both the scenery (he leaves his glasses at home) and the other runners and concentrates on beating his shortest time and longest distance. When he's not entering formal events—from which he took a hiatus for more than 20 years—he and his wife are driving across America in search of all the towns named Buffalo or traversing Spain on foot. Block occasionally goes off on amusing tangents. He writes briefly on the question of why even nonobservant Jews like himself don't eat pork, the nature of his interfaith (make that interagnostic) marriage and his preference for trees over Porta-Potties. On the whole, though, this is an account of the author's entering event after event, wondering why he keeps walking despite blisters and backaches. It's telling that the only two books whose gestation he describes in any detail are his novel Random Walk (1988) and the present volume. Fans of Block's fiction may be interested, but they should be prepared to skim the particulars of times and distances that the author assiduously records.

A peripatetic but never pedestrian memoir.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

June 1, 2009
Blocks crime fiction has entertained escapists for five decades (his assassin Kellers most recent contract was fulfilled in Hit and Run, 2008). Yet Block-fan status isnt a prerequisite for enjoying his eclectic memoir, which includes remembrances of his Buffalo, New York, youth as well as from his authorial career, and is unified by his avocation of extreme perambulation; that is, of participating in walking marathons and 24-hour endurance events. Ticking off races entered, pains defied, and times logged, Block clocks periods of intensity and idleness in what began as running in the 1970s and throttled down to race-walking as he pushed 70 in recent years. Inter alia, he tosses off wry commentary about his rationales for running and walking, reveals mock connoisseurship for an events free T-shirt, and applies ready irony to such adventures as a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, Spain, entirely accomplished by walking, of course. Blocks exercise of memory is a delight compounded of rumination and amusement.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)