Book: The Boys in the Boat
Author: Daniel James Brown
Review: Shelby Grubbs, executive director of the Atlanta Center for International Arbitration and Mediation at Georgia State University
A great story about the 1936 gold-medal eight-man rowing crew, “The Boys in the Boat” was recommended to me by one of my hiking buddies, Kevin Gaut, a lawyer in Los Angeles. Kevin rowed crew in college and because I also row, he recommended the book to me.
The story centers on the University of Washington eight-man rowing crew and their trip to the Berlin Olympics. Largely intertwined with the compelling biography of Joe Ratz, Brown follows parallel narratives on the UW-Cal Berkeley rivalry and developments in 1930s Germany as the Nazis consolidated their power and prepared for their showcase Olympic Games. Its telling is enriched by depression-era news reports about rowing – then the second-most popular Olympic sport and then as now a popular sport at UW.
Ratz was made of stern stuff. He lost his mother at 4, had scarlet fever and was put out to board at 10 in an Idaho mining village. At 15, his father and stepmother abandoned the family farm in Washington, leaving Joe behind. He nevertheless finished high school and scraped together money for college where he won a place on the UW eight man freshman crew.
That crew stayed mostly intact for four years. As seniors, they qualified for the Olympics and traveled to Berlin. There, with the Fuhrer watching, they won gold, just a fraction of a second ahead of Italy and a mere second ahead of Germany. The book concludes with a somewhat moving coda describing the post-Olympic careers of the crew.
At UW, the team shared its boathouse with a boat builder called George Pocock,. Each chapter of the book begins with a quote from the self-educated Pocock, for example:
“Harmony, balance, and rhythm. They’re the three things that stay with you your whole life. Without them civilization is out of whack. And that’s why an oarsman, when he goes out in life, he can fight it, he can handle life. That’s what he gets from rowing.”
Not a bad summary of the crew’s work together and of their subsequent lives: Like other members of the greatest generation, most went to war, and then came home where they quietly worked, raised families and made the country a better place.
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