Amazon.co.uk Review
Tilting at Windmills is the comic odyssey of a meek geek who tries to become one with the sporting life. Journalist Andy Miller is a lifelong sport-phobic who finds himself in a Britain obsessed with the stuff--from the school playing field to the various "hallowed turfs", the seemingly pointless doings have everyone around him mesmerised--and Miller decides to find out why.
A stuttering but almost successful attempt to become a QPR fan, gives way to bold stabs at embracing the totems of British sport--The Open, The Boat Race, Wimbledon--with Miller bent on breaking the "code" that allows others to find passion, drama and fun, where he finds only bad catering, yobs and stupefying boredom.
The investigation is punctuated by the ongoing story of his own endeavours in top-flight international sporting competition, as Miller finds himself drawn to the painted windmills and baffling geometry of crazy golf, pursuing his new passion around the seaside towns of Britain and onwards to European Championships, in Latvia (where he is billed by no less an organ than the Baltic Times as "the Eddie the Eagle of miniature golf").
Miller is the witty, acutely self-conscious traveller at the heart of his own story, but nevertheless pursues serious lines of enquiry into the self-deception and surrender to tribalism that characterise the sports fan, and what underpins his own long-standing resistance to "joining in". No major revelations here, but this is a light, entertaining read that could have even the most unsporty types thinking about grabbing a putter. --Alex Hankin
Review
Andy Milller was useless at games at school, and things didn't change as he grew up: 'I failed at whatever sport I turned my hand to; football, rugby, cricket, all of them.' He never understood why other people liked sport, and football is a particular loathing; he fantasizes about buying every club in the country and shutting them all down. But in a country seemingly obsessed with sport he knows he has a problem: 'What does it mean to be a man in the UK when you don't like sport? ... It means there's something not quite right with you.' Andy feels he has to give sport a chance. He becomes a supporter of Queens Park Rangers. He goes to watch tennis at Wimbledon: 'An afternoon at the All England Club is like spending an afternoon in a shopping precinct in Guildford, with the option, if you can be bothered, of watching some tennis as well.' It is not enough. He needs to find a game that he can play. He chooses minigolf. He starts playing, he starts to enjoy it, he enters competitions, he improves, he enters an international competition, he loses, he gets advice from a sports psychologist, he gets a bit obsessed, he represents his country abroad, he loses, he carries on playing, he wins, he is converted. There is room for only a small uncertainty: is minigolf really a sport? This is a very funny account with laugh-out-loud moments and some witty one-liners, as when he says of a badly refurbished minigolf course that it reminds him of what they did to Eva Peron after she died. Any bloke who got chosen last for teams will relate to this book, and any girl who wants to understand the term 'crisis of masculinity' should probably read it. (Kirkus UK)
