by Daniel James Brown ★★★★☆
I am obviously late to the party when it comes to 2013's The Boys in the Boat, which focuses on the quest by the University of Washington rowing team to win gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. With 2024 being an olympic year, it felt right to bump it to the top of the queue. Since it was published, the book has become a bestseller, inspired a 2016 PBS documentary The Boys of ’36, and has been adapted into a motion picture that shares the same title as the original non-fiction book. All that should make it obvious that this is a pretty compelling story. And it is!
The book traces the development of the University Washington rowing program through the first part of the 20th century, its rivalry with the University of California, and eventually the years leading up to the 1936 Olympic Games. The buildup to Berlin is lengthy -- at one point I noticed I was on hour 11 out of 14 in the audiobook, and the boys still had not landed in Germany! -- but it was important to Brown to have readers connect with the boys before reaching climactic event that inspired the story. Brown initially met one of the nine boys, Joe Rantz, through his daughter Judy Willman in the waning months of Rantz's life. That introduction and Judy's passion for having the story told broadly was the genesis for the project. As such, the book is more heavily weighted towards Rantz than any of the other boys. Brown does make an effort to fill in some backstory for several of the young men, as well as head coach Al Ulbrickson, but for the most part this is "The Joe Rantz Story".
While much of the information for the book was collected through interviews with Rantz, other surviving boat members, and their extended family, Brown also thoroughly researched the events he chronicled. As he says in the bibliography, "The original manuscript for this book contained well over a thousand endnotes." It is thorough, but also to a greater extent than is probably necessary. For example, there are plenty of pages devoted to the challenging weather events that occurred in the early 1930s, from heat spikes to dust storms to torrential rains. Those have no bearing on the story, other than to transport the reader to that time. At nearly 500 print pages, there was room to trim parts of the story, and I think a slightly more extensive excising and editing process could have improved the final manuscript. Also, while I understand the reasons behind the focus on Joe Rantz, a more balanced look at the boat in total, or in particular the backstories of Don Hume (the "stroke" -- the most essential member of any rowing crew who sits directly in front of the coxswain and sets the pace) or Bobby Moch (the coxswain, the effective head coach and brains of the boat during a race). While Rantz faced a set of hardships growing up that are hard to believe, I felt like there was more story to tell about both Hume and Moch, especially once a key secret about Moch is revealed.
Those are small nits that bump this from a 5-star book to something closer to a 4.5, but overall this is a really compelling story. Brown, as well as audiobook narrator Edward Herrmann, do a tremendous job of replicating the excitement of crew races and close finishes, a significant accomplishment through the written word. Brown also does a great job of capturing what rowing means to those who undertake it. It is more than simply a sport, more than extreme physical exertion or mental toughness. There is a singular unity to a rowing team that one would be hard-pressed to replicate in any other sport. A passage from the prologue helps to illustrate this, as Brown recounts Joe Rantz talking about his life and the lead-up to Berlin:
"None of these recollections brought him to tears, though. It was when he tried to talk about 'the boat' that his words began to falter and tears welled up in his bright eyes.
At first, I thought he meant the Husky Clipper, the racing shell in which he had rowed his way to glory. Or did he mean his teammates, the improbable assemblage of young men who had pulled off one of rowing's greatest achievements? Finally, watching Joe struggle for composure over and over, I realized that 'the boat' was something more than just the shell or its crew. To Joe, it encompassed but transcended both -- it was something mysterious and almost beyond definition. It was a shared experience -- a singular thing that had unfolded in a golden sliver of time long gone, when nine good-hearted young men strove together, pulled together as one, gave everything they had for one another, bound together by pride and respect and love. Joe was crying, at least in part, for the loss of that vanished moment but much more, I think, for the sheer beauty of it."
The research is thorough, the writing is strong, and the story one that deserved to be told. It's well worth a read (or a listen).
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