The Boys in the Boat

I'm a reading a book that you might enjoy.  It knits several elements -- a remarkable personal story, the fellowship of athletes, observations on life and sport and global tensions 80 years ago -- into a readable narrative that holds my attention and is pulling me right along.

The book is The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown, who discovered almost by accident that a neighbor of his had been part of a remarkable rowing team at the University of Washington in the early and mid 1930s.

The neighbor, Joe Rantz, had a difficult youth.  After his mother died and his father remarried, Joe was basically abandoned in the early days of the Depression.  Resourceful, honorable, hard-working and very, very poor, he found his way to the University of Washington and onto its rowing team as a member of an 8+, a scull with eight rowers and a coxswain who called the pace.

Here are a couple things I've learned along the way in this remarkable story:

     -- The popularity of competitive rowing in years past.
      In 1934, almost 80,000 people came to watch a UW regatta with the University of California, Berkeley, at Lake Washington; many thousands of others, in both states, followed live event reports on the radio.
     The Intercollegiate Rowing Association's regatta, on the Hudson River near Poughkeepsie, N.Y., attracted as many 125,000 spectators each year.
     Sports writers and broadcasters of the day covered rowing competitions as they now do football and basketball, although apparently paying attention to crews instead of individual athletes.

     -- The challenge of competitive rowing, and its beauty.
     "Physiologists, in fact, have calculated that rowing a two-thousand-meter race -- the Olympic standard -- takes the same physiological toll as playing two basketball games back-to-back.  And it exacts that toll in about six minutes," writes the author.
      The sport commands "the perfectly synchronized flow of muscle, oars, boat and water; the single, whole, unified and beautiful symphony that a crew in motion becomes -- is all that matters."
      The idea of committing oneself, all in, to the perfection of a focused, demanding, cooperative effort is so compelling that I almost wish I had gone out for crew myself when I was in college.  We all want to be part of something bigger than ourselves.

But the book is about more than that.

It sets the Washington team -- rowers, coaches and the philosophical woodworker who built the most efficient sculls in the world -- in the difficult days of the Depression with broader sketches of hardship across the United States during those years.

It follows the group's ups and downs as it tackles its elusive and challenging ambition to row in the 1936 Olympic games held in Berlin, then ruled by a darkening Nazi regime that planned to use the games to promote its malign devotion to the idea of Aryan superiority.

The pursuit of the Olympic goal drives the book forward.  The interwoven story of one rower's hard life and gallant perseverance adds personal interest that keeps the reader turning the pages.

The Boys in the Boat was released in May and now is available on Kindle for only $2.99.

   
  
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