'There is nothing -- absolutely nothing -- half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats', said Ratty to Mole, a sentiment doubted by Montmorency, the dog who skiffed with Jerome K. Jerome's three men, but echoed by picnickers, punters, and pleasure-seekers as well as competitive rowers and scullers the world over. Christopher Dodd, the Guardian's Deputy Features Editor and rowing correspondent, has chosen a varied and entertaining selection of anecdotes from Kenneth Grahame's classic to East Germany's coaching manual. There are true-life accounts of triumphs and disasters in the Boat Race, at Henley, on the Thames and the Wear, memoirs of rowing's greats and gurus, of humble and proud heroes of fiction. From Beerbohm's bewitching Zuleika Dobson to Kipling's vision of the galleys, from tea at Richmond with Dr. Furnivall and the ABC girls to a Tyneside dance, from Dickens's Lambeth to tiffin in Shanghai, "Boating" adds wit and wisdom to the charm of the oar and the lure of the river. Dodd is a journalist turned writer and historian, specializing in rowing. After thirty years helping to edit the Guardian, he co-founded the River & Rowing Museum at Henley-on-Thames, where he is a historian and curator. He was the founding co-editor, with Rachel Quarrell, of Rowing Voice, an independent electronic magazine which entered the air waves after the success of the Eton Mess daily publication at the World Rowing Championships in 2006. The Voice covers the big events like nobody else, and occasionally blogs (voice.rowingservice.com).