My grandfather who was the official doctor of the Hungarian team in , left a wonderful book for me I loved this book. My grandfather who was the official doctor of the Hungarian team in , left a wonderful book for me with lots of pictures of those Olympics. This book provides another perspective for me.
Well worth the read. View 2 comments. Sep 03, Carol rated it really liked it Shelves: non-fiction , read While a bit heavy on the practice runs for me the excitement of the actual races kept me engrossed as well as the heartbreaking personal background of Joe Rantz, and his struggles to overcome adversity.
Feb 02, Brian rated it really liked it. Although its primary focus is the sport of rowing, and specifically the sport on the west coast of the US, and more specifically at the University of Washington and 9 crew members and the coaching staff there, it also captures an era and the first 40 years of the 20th century very well. This text does a nice job of jumping between the life of Joe Rantz the member of this iconic crew team that the book gives the most attention to , the history and mechanics of the sport of rowing, and the Olympic Games in Nazi Berlin.
The depiction of the buildup to, and opening ceremony of, the Olympic Games is well done. The author jumps from the perspective of the boys on the US Rowing Team to the propagandist workings of the Nazi state and the manner in which they created the image of the games and Nazi Germany that they wanted conveyed to the world.
It is compelling. A highlight of the text is chapter 18 where the reader is immersed in the climatic gold medal race. The writing is taut, dramatic, and creates tension in the reader despite the fact that we already know the result.
Daniel James Brown is a solid writer. His prose is efficient, but not beautiful. Occasionally he tries to get poetic, and it is just not his milieu, and it shows.
This is not a criticism of his style, just an observation. The good moments in this text far outnumber the bad. As I read the Epilogue, I missed my grandfather and some of the other people I have known from this generation of Americans. Our society has fallen short of the life those people lived. In this text we are hit again and again with the hardships that were such a normal part of life for most Americans during the first 40 years of the last century, and one wonders if our current generations could surpass with such flying colors the hardships that they did.
Youth is for a season, life just a vapor that quickly passes, and then it is gone. And few there are among us that will have a sort of immortality as those boys did. The final paragraphs of the text drive that realization home.
They are simply lovely to read. I listened to The Boys in the Boat on audio, which was a good way to absorb this book. It's the story of the US rowing victory in the Olympics. There's way more to this book than "they worked hard, and then they won". Daniel James Brown cleverly pulls together a lot of great information, which I listened to in 40 minute increments on my walk to work every morning.
He focuses particularly on one of the oarsmen, Joe Rantz, giving a very detailed portrait of his family, background and characte I listened to The Boys in the Boat on audio, which was a good way to absorb this book. He focuses particularly on one of the oarsmen, Joe Rantz, giving a very detailed portrait of his family, background and character. He also focuses on Washington State University's rowing program, including the local boat builder, the coaches, and the years of training and races before the Olympics.
He provides information about the rowing scene in the US. He delves into many technical and psychological aspects of rowing. He also covers some US politics and economics of the time, and what was going on in Berlin in the lead up to the Olympics. And of course, he gives a detailed account of the trip to Berlin and THE race. It's a lot of information, but it's vividly put together and generally really interesting.
My very favourite part was Rantz's story. His family background is very sad, and Brown powerfully fleshes out his story, character and the importance of rowing to his life. At times, other aspects of the book felt long and a bit too detailed and my interest would drift.
But this is a minor complaint. This was worth the listen and provided me with good company every morning. View all 10 comments. Sep 15, Elizabeth rated it really liked it Shelves: history , nonfiction. 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 forever by pride and respect and love.
You know, that infamous example of the analogy where: runner: marathon A envoy: embassy B martyr: massacre C oarsman: regatta D horse: stable And, folks, the answer choice is C! Process of elimination notwithstanding, the essential critique was that this question advantaged the more affluent test-takers who knew what the heck a regatta actually was, let alone coxswains or catching crabs. Crew is one of those sports that grew popular in the rich and wealthy corridors of Oxford and Cambridge and found its way to the elite collegiate counterparts on the New England coast.
I had this strikingly similar perception myself I placed it in the same box as golf , so color me surprised that there was a book about nine scrappy boys from the West who scrabbled their way to gold at the Berlin Olympics.
The Boys in the Boat is an underdog story at its finest. Boys who were hardened by the Great Depression and crippling poverty but persevered to accomplish a special feat in their time together at the University of Washington.
These were loggers, farm boys, miners, and fishermen—the perfect antithesis to the old money and tradition of the Ivy League crews. And when they race against the other teams, you feel their exhilaration in victory as your own. When they struggle to find their swing, your heart grows leaden with the same anxiety and disappointment. Focusing on the years preceding , the book spends the most time with Joe Rantz. His mother died young, and his father and stepmother abandoned him at age ten to fend for himself in the wilderness of Washington.
His compelling story, as are the struggles and triumphs of the other key characters that intercalate this central narrative, ultimately allow The Boys in the Boat to shine. Unfortunately, some plotlines felt disruptive; I personally found the parts about Hitler and Germany less essential, too vague that they failed to establish the desired context. Despite occasions where Brown may wander too far into descriptions of events and risk veering into a string of platitudes, I appreciated his natural exposition about the details of this sport.
Melding some beginner-level physics with the basic technique of crew and coaching strategy, I found myself getting a better picture of the skill and coordination that must be flawlessly implemented by an eight-man rowing team.
This book is undoubtedly of the inspirational variety. Eventually, the crew, the races, the Olympics all drift away into the background until you reach the crux of it—the accomplishment of nine good men bound by trust and affection. They were rowing perfectly, fluidly, mindlessly. They were rowing as if on another plane, as if in a black void among the stars, just as Pocock had said they might. And it was beautiful. View all 28 comments. Oct 12, Michael rated it really liked it Shelves: biography , non-fiction , history , germany , sports , washington.
Quite an uplifting story of the young men from the University of Washington who took the gold medal for nine-men shell rowing at the Olympics in Berlin. Starting in , we get the story of a young man, Joe Rantz, arriving at the college and merging the dreams from his hardscrabble life with that of other sons o Quite an uplifting story of the young men from the University of Washington who took the gold medal for nine-men shell rowing at the Olympics in Berlin.
Starting in , we get the story of a young man, Joe Rantz, arriving at the college and merging the dreams from his hardscrabble life with that of other sons of miners, farmers, and lumbermen of the northwest. The other story is that of the coaches who mold and inspire this raw human material into a team which hopefully can beat their traditional rivals, University of California at Berkley, and challenge in the annual regatta in Poughkeepsie the historical masters of the sport, the elite private colleges of the East.
These include the crafty and laconic head coach, Al Ubrickson, and legendary boat builder George Pocock, the guru of a Zen-like philosophy of rowing and master of techniques adapted from Thames working boatmen that he picked up from his days at Eton.
He lost his mother at a young age, and his father married a much younger woman who favored her own children over her stepson. A heartbreaking story to read about. But he became strong from plenty of outdoor work, self-reliant to the extreme, and ripe for a sense of belonging that a team sport can engender.
Going out at dawn in the bay in all kinds of weather and pushing himself beyond exhaustion and pain was something he could handle well. His new girlfriend is a big support, though she finds it hard to understand how Joe can forgive his father for the abandonment.
It took a lot for the coaches to help Joe surmount a wavering confidence and performance so bound up in a fundamental mistrust of people.
Pocock eventually found an angle to instill a way for Joe to submit himself to a trust in his teammates. George Pocock learned much about the hearts and souls of young men. He learned to see hope where a boy thought there was no hope, to see skill where skill was obscured by ego or by anxiety. He observed the fragility of confidence and the redemptive power of trust.
He detected the strength of the gossamer threads of affection that sometimes grew between a pair of young men or among a boatload of them striving honestly to do their best. And he came to understand how those almost mystical bonds of trust and affection, if nurtured correctly, might lift a crew above the ordinary sphere, transport it to a place where nine boys somehow became one thing—a thing that could not quite be defined, a thing that was so in tune with the water and the earth and sky above that, as they rowed, effort was replaced by ecstasy.
It was a rare thing, a sacred thing, a thing devoutly to be hoped for. And in the years since coming to Washington, George Pocock had quietly become its high priest. How he designed and constructed by hand the elegant foot racing shells. The special qualities of wood for each component of the boat, buoyant and flexible Western red cedar for the panels, long straight sugar pine for keels, and resilient and strong ash for the frames.
Joe grooves on this artistry, based on his experience working on hauling cedar out of woods with horses and hand cutting of shingles. Team rowing is such an unusual sport in how so much effort goes into preparation for so few and so brief competitions, events that provide no spotlight for individual performance success.
My recent personal experiences with a rowing shell given to me by a neighbor contributes to an appreciation of some of the physical details. Like the trade-off between fast strokes and deep hard strokes. The precision of wrist action required to control the angle of the oar at entry and exit from the water. These factors are amplified in importance when it comes to achieving the synchrony required in team rowing.
I never imagined the hidden sociology that lies behind a good team: …the greatest paradox of the sport has to do with the psychological makeup of the people who pull the oars. Great oarsmen and oarswomen are necessarily made of conflicting stuff—of oil and water, fire and earth. On the one hand, they must possess enormous self-confidence, strong egos, and titanic willpower. They must be almost immune to frustration. Nobody who does not believe deeply in himself or herself—in his or her ability to endure hardship and to prevail over adversity—is likely even to attempt something as audacious as competitive rowing at the highest levels.
The sport offers so many opportunities for suffering and so few opportunities for glory that only the most tenaciously self-reliant and self-motivated are likely to succeed at it. And yet, at the same time—and this is key—no other sport demands and rewards the complete abandonment of the self the way that rowing does. Great crews may have men or women of exceptional talent or strength; they may have outstanding coxswains or stroke oars or bowmen; but they have no stars.
The team effort—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. Not the individual, not the self.
Somehow all this must mesh. Even after the right mixture is found, each man or woman in the boat must recognize his or her place in the fabric of the crew, accept it, and accept the others as they are. Brown brings out the truth of these conclusions among the cast of characters Joe rows with over the years preceding the Olympic meet. A particular coxswain, Bobby Mock, also proved essential to the final team.
He or she is a deep thinker, canny like a fox, inspirational, and in many cases the toughest person in the boat. Throughout the book we get interludes on the preparation of the Germans for using the Olympics as a great propaganda showcase of Nazi greatness, proof that they were the pinnacle of Western civilization and not monsters.
The mastery of filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl and Minister of Propaganda Goebbels in pulling off this largely successful triumph is highlighted well and placed in contrast with the perspective of the rowing crew of ordinary Americans from average walks of life.
They made sure no anti-Jewish signs were visible and underclasses like Gypsies were hustled out of town. Germany won most of the rowing races, but the win by the boys from Washington put a nice dent in their armor. The exciting details of adversities the American rowers had to overcome on the day of the competition awaits your reading pleasure. But some of that hunger comes from the successful illusion that this is a novel.
The writing depended on limited resources, including interviews with Joe at age about 90, the daily logs of Ubrickson, and a biography of Pocock. There is footage from the rowing races at the Berlin Olympics on YouTube. View all 20 comments. Jul 02, Chrissie rated it really liked it Shelves: read , audible , usa , bio , germany , history.
I am not competitive and team sports do not enthuse me, yet still I got excited and was rooting for the American team. Crazy but true. Every darn reviewer says the same thing! I have to explain what I think happened to me. It took me a while to feel the excitement. Half-way through the book I had an epiphany. I am a loner I am not competitive and team sports do not enthuse me, yet still I got excited and was rooting for the American team.
I am a loner. Give me a job and I will do it well, but please let me do it alone. To understand team thinking is hard for me The author personalizes the Olympic win through Joe Rantz, one of the American rowing crew that won the Olympic Gold in Berlin in One of eight oarsmen, one of nine if you count in the coxswain. But you have to count in the coach, Al Ulbrickson. You have to count in George Pocock, he made the boats. These shells are not just any old boats. They are made with western redcedar Thuja plicata , but more importantly they are made with love and care.
You have at least eleven people working together and the only way to succeed is to forget your own self and become one with the others. THIS is what I had to understand. It didn't help to be told this, in the first half of the book, but finally I understood it, in my heart, in my being. That is the epiphany. The complete synchronism of a group is a beauty to behold. By tying the Olympic win to these people the author makes you understand.
Tell me, how many books can pull in a reader when the subject is a whole group of people? Brown succeeds. Particularly Joe Rantz and George Popcock, their life stories grabbed me, but plenty is told of the others so you understand how it happens they all became one. You cannot be told to feel what you don't feel. You cannot be lectured or threatened with, "Otherwise you will fail! Joe, he too had to have such an epiphany. Topics covered - the infatuation with Hitler in Berlin in the 30s, antisemitism in Germany and the US in the 30s, the publicity stunt of Leni Riefenstahl, the Depression, a dysfunctional family, the beauty of wood and of course rowing.
All of these topics are woven in bit by bit. They are not dumped on you, so you sink. You have to understand the art of rowing to understand the win.
I had quite a bit to learn. The only thing I worried about is how much of this "team spirit" credo was a creation of the author to make a good story and how much was what actually was going on in Joe's head then, back there in the 30s.
I am a born skeptic. Louise Mallard, afflicted with a heart condition, reflects on the death of her husband from the safety of her locked room. When Nick Mason 15 and Sebastian Page Franklin 16 announced they were going to sail the nautical miles around the island of Mallorca to raise money for charity, they had a knackered boat and very limited sailing experience.
With the help and enthusiasm of Very Nice People, they won a Best of. The rabbit was very pleased with himself, and for good reason: he was owned by a girl named Abilene, who adored. The Boys in the Boat. The Boys in the Boat by Daniel Brown. Under a Flaming Sky by Daniel Brown. Facing the Mountain by Daniel James Brown.
Lord of the Flies by William Golding. The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein. With The Boys in the Boat , crew has found its voice in Daniel James Brown, who tells a thrilling, heart-thumping tale of a most remarkable band of rowing brothers who upstaged Adolf Hitler at the Olympics.
Well-told history, packed with suspense and a likable bunch of underdogs at the heart of an improbable triumph. Daniel James Brown has not only captured the hearts and souls of the University of Washington rowers who raced in the Olympics, he has conjured up an era of history. Your Comment:. Read Online Download. Add a review Your Rating: Your Comment:.
Fox by Daniel J.
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