Uncommon Heart

by Anne Audain, John L. Parker Jr., John L. Parker

Born in New Zealand with badly deformed feet, Anne Audain was adopted as an infant by a kindly, hard-working couple--a printer and his wife--who nurtured her and taught her that being adopted meant she was special because she had been selected over all the other available babies. But she was a tiny child, shy and bookish, and with her awkward, stumbling gait, she became a special target for teasing by her classmates. Finally, when she was 13, the doctors felt her bones were strong enough to sustain an operation, and her condition was surgically corrected. Liberated from much of the pain and awkwardness for the first time, she discovered athletics at a local club and literally in a matter of months had become a nationally known runner in New Zealand. She went on to run in the Olympics, win a Commonwealth Games gold medal, set a world track record, and to move to the United States where she became the first female professional runner, a Nike sponsored athlete, and the most successful woman road runner of all time, winning most of the major U.S. road races she entered from 1981 to 1991. Now a naturalized citizen, she is a successful motivational speaker and businesswoman, and is the founder of the Idaho Women's Fitness Celebration, one of the largest women's sporting events in the world. The biography of Anne Audain is a fascinating, inspiring story for all readers but especially for women, young people, and athletes.

278 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2000

Reviews

[Emily · Rating 2 out of 5]

Anne Audain is a great runner, she will tell you so herself, repeatedly, every other page or so in her autobiography. She is however, unfortunately, not a great writer. When I saw that John L Parker was coauthoring the book I thought he would help with the writing of , turn a good story into a book people might actually enjoy reading, unfortunately, for whatever reason, this isn't the case.
Audain is content to tell us her entire story as though we are not there, the exciting things have already happened and this is the tired rehash. There is not a single scene in this book in which the audience is shown what happens, the author makes it clrea that everything has already happened before we got here and nothing exciting is going to happen for the rest of the book. I confess I couldnt finish the book- I made it through until the end, where she winds on for about fifty pages telling about every race she won and how fast her times were even though she wasn't training very much and was getting, to quote herself and other runners, "fat." Wow! Talk about inspiring! I'm going to quit training too and become fat, maybe then I can win races too!