First You Have to Row a Little Boat Reflections on Life & Living

Written from the point of view of a grown man looking back on his childhood, and reflecting on what the experience of learning to sail taught him about the lessons of life, "First You Have to Row a Little Boat" has the makings of an inspirational classic.With each brief chapter telling the story of a young man's initiation to adulthood, the bay on which he sails becomes a universe of sorts, teaching him new lessons about making choices, adapting to change, and becoming his own person with every journey he takes. Filled with the spiritual wisdom and thought-provoking discoveries that marked such books as "Walden," "The Prophet," and the "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," "First You Have to Row a Little Boat" is a wondrous and magical book that will enchant both sailors and non-sailors alike, but most of all, anyone who seeks large truths in small things."It is not only remindful of those joys of childhood that are part of all our memories, but it is evocative of those seriousthoughts we carried with us and that were so essential a part of what we each became. For a sailor, of course, it is pure joy, bubbling forth fr

Richard Bode worked at McGraw Hill and was editorial director and chief speechwriter at Burston-Marsteller. As a freelance writer, he contributed to Reader's Digest, Good Housekeeping, Sail, Sports Illustrated. He is also the author of Blue Sloop at Dawn (1979), which was excerpted in Sports Illustrated, Newsday Sunday Magazine, and Sail, and wrote the award-winning essay "To Climb the Wind." He died in 2003 of liver cancer.