The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics
In 1936, just a few years before Germany invaded Poland and war broke out, the Olympics were held in Berlin, bringing athletes from around the globe to compete in the center of the budding Nazi empire.
The Boys in the Boat begins half a world away from the streets of Hitler’s Berlin, on the shores of a cold and windswept Lake Washington. There, working-class students jostled to gain a place on the University of Washington rowing team. One of them, Joe Rantz, forms the heartbreaking and inspiring through-line of Daniel James Brown’s epic historical narrative. Born into a tumultuous family life and abandoned by his widower father as a young boy, Joe struggled to feed himself during the Great Depression, eventually putting himself through school with the money he earned while working long summer hours in logging. As a member of Washington crew, he was one of the nine young men who, first dismissed as unknowns from the west, eventually rose to compete on the greatest stage in their sport.
Written with exquisite detail and character-building, The Boys in the Boat is an homage to a sport that requires both passion and teamwork, and is written with the kind of suspense rarely found in history books.
Quote:
“All over America millions of people — people who had hardly heard of Seattle before the Poughkeepsie Regatta, people who had to go to work later that Friday morning, if they were lucky enough to have a job, people who had to tend to the farm chores, if they were lucky enough to still have a farm—were also starting to fiddle with the dials on their radios. The Jesse Owens story had already galvanized much of the nation, driving home what exactly was at stake in these Olympic Games. Now America waited to see if the rough-and-tumble western boys from Washington State would write another chapter in the story.”
Author:
Daniel James Brown is the author of The Boys in the Boat, Facing the Mountain, The Indifferent Stars Above, and Under a Flaming Sky. He has taught writing at Stanford University and San Jose Sate University, and currently lives outside of Seattle, Washington.
Published: 2013
Length: 404 pages
Primary Settings: Seattle, Washington, U.S.; Berlin, Germany
Secondary Setting: Poughkeepsie, New York, U.S.