Category: Review

April 19, 2024 – The Divine Comedy, Purgatory, Canto XVI

April 19, 2024 /

This week we are at Cornice three, the wrathful. On one hand, only having one Canto to read is nice and easy. On the other hand, it is difficult because there is not that much to talk about. That is definitely the case here. There is a little description of the environment and one interaction with a basically unknown character so that is it.

Cornice three is filled with smoke. Apparently, the symbolism relates to wrath in that when a person is in rage, their judgement is clouded with the true ability to see the situation clearly. I wonder if this is the level that Dante is headed for. Clearly, he is impacted by the fear of being there or falling off of the edge.

That is is about all I have to say about it. I was looking up the definition of wrath to see if I could infer more this week than is really written. Wrathful is literally defined as full of wrath. And wrath is defined as vengeful anger or rage. Then I stumbled across something a little more interesting.

Wrath is defined as one of the seven deadly sins. Let us see if you recognize these? The remaining six are pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, and slothfulness. These were first defined by Pope Gregory I in the 6th century. This seems a lot like the circles of hell and purgatory. But what is even more interesting is that they were picked up again by St. Thomas Aquinas in the mid 13th century.

While not likely a contemporary of Dante’s (late 1200s) surely being Italian and Dante being exposed to priesthood, he was surely influenced by this work. Reading the Encyclopedia Britannica article, it mentions that the seven deadly sins are not specifically named in the bible, which I would agree. Despite not being codified, it is also true that many situations are specifically mentioned in the bible.

Pope Gregory I is credited with organizing the church into it’s medieval form. He consolidated both secular and religious power into one institution. I think that he left an indelible mark on Dante given that he will have more roles and interactions in the future. Not only has Dante bought the concept, but he also thinks pretty highly of him as well.

The same also goes with St. Thomas. Again looking around, there are books comparing and crediting the two. The one remarkable argument in this chapter is the case for free will. Without it, why would there be any need for purgatory. And if we are all predestined to our position and results in life, what would be the point of the afterworld in general?

I guess I fall somewhere in the middle. I do believe that God has a hand in our fate, but I also believe that our free will influences that. So for instance, take a fatal illness. I am not convinced that this is punishment, but I do believe that there is something to be learned or taught from it. It is the actions that people take during that time that helps push God’s will. It is up to the individual to do with that what they can. Salvation is always an waiting regardless of fate.

End Your Programming Routine: While one chapter is a quick read, it wasn’t insignificant. I stumbled upon the origin story of the structure of the Divine Comedy. If I wouldn’t have been looking for more about wrath, I don’t know if I ever would have made the connection to the church history largely because I am not Catholic. Next week it is Cantos XVII – XIX if you are following along.

April 12, 2024 – The Divine Comedy, Purgatory, Canto XIII – XV

April 12, 2024 /

This week is the second cornice or the level of Envy. Once again, the punishment is relevant to the crime. It goes from dress to behavior to attitude. When in this level, souls are wearing brownish, grayish cloaks that blend into the surroundings. The point of that is that it is opposite of envy. While something catches your eye that you want, in this case the souls cannot be seen.

Once they cannot be seen, then they cannot see. The souls eyes are sewn shut so that they are not able to look, the nature or conduit of their sin. There isn’t a lot to do there except pray and sing. A lot of the vitriol that proceeded the previous stops were absent here.

I have been thinking about this for several weeks now. There have been very few mentions of women to date. We of course have the pursuit to Beatrice and there have been a few spirits or furies, but no real characters. It makes me wonder exactly what the colloquial feeling on women and the afterworld was at the time.

For sure, this was a patriarchy but does that mean that women were considered sinless? I highly doubt that but they probably didn’t have the same opportunity to commit all the politically motivated sins. It is also likely that because this piece is making fun of all of Dante’s enemies, he may not have had quarrel with women. I will be curious to see if the proportion of women pick-up through the remainder of the book.

This is another week that had a long diatribe of people and events, specifically Canto XIV. I happened to by trying to read in the hospital. It was really difficult flipping back and forth between the footnotes and text as well as paying half attention to what I was doing.

I suppose that I should be grateful that there is more notes than actual text. Without them, I would be lost in the mythology references. And, I could probably ignore them and just read the text straight through. But, it is really hard to maintain continuity of the story flipping back and forth every couple of minutes. In general, an average Canto takes me about thirty minutes to read.

End Your Programming Routine: This is going to be a short one. Next week, Cornice 3 is going to be Canto XVI only. Truth be told, the farther I go along, the more confused I am between the separation of Hell and Purgatory. Notes give me a small backstory with each interaction but there are still characters that were murdered, committed suicide and killed others. Maybe it was a matter of asking forgiveness? Otherwise, I just don’t know.

April 5, 2024 – The Divine Comedy, Purgatory, Canto X – XII

April 5, 2024 /

Finally, we are into Purgatory proper. Honestly, it wasn’t exactly as I thought it would be. I guess knowing nothing, I probably should have had no expectations. But, it seemed like a kinder and gentler hell. Maybe that was just my prospective. I was expecting a holding area until you served your time; kind of like jail.

If I understand Purgatory correctly, it is a place to atone for your sins before advancing. This is the first cornice and it is pride. On this cornice, souls will be penalized equal to their sin. As an example, the soul was proud for 40 years, therefore there is 40 years of cornice one. I presume that someone does not have just one sin and therefore once the soul advances, he will continue with the punishment regime for that amount of time until all sin is expunged.

Interestingly enough, when Dante entered purgatory, his forehead was marked with seven ‘P’s. This apparently weighed him down to the point where he could not proceed. Once Pride is atoned, one ‘P’ is removed and so is the weight for him to advance. The punishment for pride is carrying a giant bolder around. It was said that the souls were ground to dust by the weight of what they were carrying. It is as if the lesson of pride is the weight of the attitude will crush them.

One other key distinction between Purgatory proper and all of the previous levels is that temptation is no longer an issue. It seems that if you make it through the gates, you are guaranteed to move forward after you served your time. I don’t recall that being a subject earlier, but it was mentioned here.

Another feature of each cornice is a relief on entry and on leaving. In both of those cases, they are featuring characters through history and mythology that show the cause and effect of pride. I suppose it is a reminder of why you are here and the price paid for worldly behavior, specifically sin.

I have to admit, when it comes to a lot of names, I kind of zone out. First of all, I know next to nothing about mythology. I am uninterested in local, recent history as well. As a result, I have a very difficult time with who is who and what the backstory is on all of the relief figures or even conversations.

I think that I have evolved into a bigger picture person. When I was young, I was all about details. That saying ‘see the forest from the trees’ comes to mind. The world needs both types of people. But for me, it causes me to try and get to the point of things. I suspect that I was always this way but didn’t know how to analyze or distill all the data into something actionable. Therefore, when presented lists of names, I kind of glaze over or even skim. There needs to be a point of reference for perspective otherwise it is just a factoid that has little future bearing.

End Your Programming Routine: Next week is onto the second cornice for Envy. That would be Cantos XIII – XV. It is also worthy of noting that the climbing gets easier for Dante and Virgil. So far, there has been a lot of surprises in Purgatory. I guess that is what it means to be naïve.

April 2, 2024 – A Moveable Feast

April 2, 2024 /

A Moveable Feast by Earnest Hemmingway is the March Left Coast Culinary Book Club selection. By an unfortunate series of events, I had to cancel the actual moveable feast as my wife was having a procedure done in preparation for Chemotherapy. The plan was to go crabbing and then have a seafood boil afterwards.

I was introduced to the seafood boil in South Carolina, named the ‘low country boil’. It is sausage, corn on the cob, small boiling potatoes and some kind of regional seafood. We were planning on catching a couple local Dungeness crabs and feasting out. I have come to learn that there are many different versions using crawdads or lobsters or soft shelled crabs depending on what is available regionally.

A Moveable Feast was published posthumously and featured Hemingway’s years in Paris and some of France. It is really a series of writings that he made while he was there and tucked away in his belongings to be discovered after he died. As a result, it is kind of a incongruous set of chapters with different interactions of the period.

Hemingway served in World War I and kind of fell in love with Europe. He spent roughly 1921-1927 living in Paris as a result. While he was there, he tended to rub shoulders with all of the expatriates that were also there. The chapters were some of those interactions with people like Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and F. Scott Fitzgerald. By proximity and scene, he also befriended people like Pablo Picasso as well.

Hemingway was an interesting dichotomy. On one hand, he was an artist. He had passion, partied hard and loved hard. On the other hand, he was a man’s man interested in hunting and fishing and bull fighting. Clearly, he was worldly choosing Paris and Cuba for a lot of his life, but ending it in Idaho (literally).

I wouldn’t call myself a Hemingway fan per se but I definitely prefer him to many and most of the contemporary classic writers. I think about The Old Man and the Sea or The Sun Also Rises and remember not hating it like some of the others we read. But, I have to say that this book felt like a money grab. There was no real story, just anecdotes of his run ins with cronies. And not really interesting at that.

I believe that it is called Moveable Feast because nearly all of the chapters center around Ernest at a cafe and talking about writing or talking with other artists. They seemed to have a bit here, then move somewhere else all kind of dreaming and scheming about the work.

This isn’t a culinary book but there is plenty of food and drink in it. Beer, wine, cocktails and coffee flow freely as well. I proposed that if the book offended the senses of the hard-core cookbook readers of the group, they could also check out the PBS series of the same name. That I could get behind. I love Americana and people passionate about what they do.

End Your Programming Routine: My recommendation on this one is skip. If you are extremely interested in the life of Hemingway, then maybe this is your cup of tea. I simply did not find enough value in the book to recommend. I still want to have the seafood boil, but that will likely have to wait until after all of this cancer stuff. For now, I can keep on reading while I play the support role.

March 29, 2024 – The Divine Comedy, Purgatory, Canto I – IX

March 29, 2024 /

With all that is going on, I struggled to get through this week. In my book, nine Cantos was something like 160 pages, including the introduction to Purgatory as well. With all the notes and heavy language and combined with the distractions just made it difficult. I will put all of that aside because here we are.

As I have stated earlier in this review, I am not a believer in Purgatory. I have never really studied it and so I really don’t know much about it. After reading this week, I can kind of, sort of get a sense of it’s purpose in the role of heaven. At least I understand how the religion effects the after world.

Again, I imagine that I will get a real education throughout the series. But, for instance at the different levels are those that sought repentance from God at their last moments. Above them are people that died without last rites, like being killed in battle or murdered. Presumably they were mostly good or faithful but didn’t get a final blessing before death.

I don’t fully understand third shelf. It was political leaders who led their states into conflict, I think. Things do get mixed up between figures here versus other leaders in the Inferno. Like I stated there, I think this is as much as what side they were on in Dante’s perspective rather then their actual deeds.

Just as in hell, the symbology runs deep in Purgatory. Hell was all dark all the time. Purgatory has days and nights. Purgatory is described as a mountain. It is steepest at the start and gets easier as you go. The idea is that eventually, if souls stay on the right path or wait long enough and are earnest in their repentance that they will eventually advance. Just as the mountain is steep, they could just as easily not advance or give up. Makes sense to me.

Canto nine ends at the gates of Purgatory. There are moral challenges and judgement to entering. Also, the sentry warns them not to look back on entry or they will be kicked out. This is a serious stage gate in the afterlife.

Part and parcel with my beliefs, I don’t take the Catholic view of baptism to heart. Reading along here it was indicated people that died before receiving the initial baptism go not to purgatory but to hell. Presumably to the very first level that Virgil is in which is the level for souls before Christ. My belief in the new covenant and a benevolent God finds this belief almost counter-intuitive.

End Your Programming Routine: I am not anti-Catholic. I respect most faiths that generally fall into order with my line of beliefs. There is a lot of good that they do throughout the world and I have a lot of interaction with that faith because my wife’s family is largely Catholic. Heck, I’ve gone to baptism class twice even to be god-parents. There is just some doctrine I cannot get behind. Babies dying condemned to hell, while politicians waiting to get into heaven, no.

March 22, 2024 – The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Conclusion

March 22, 2024 /

Let’s take a moment to breath. It hasn’t been too many pages but the ones that are there are rough ones. There is a lot of innuendo and recent history to Dante as well as mythology and biblical references that we had to wade through. It was many a night that it took me two hours to get through 30 pages.

I should go back to the very beginning. I first read this book in AP English, in high school. My version was a straight translation and I really had no idea what was going on. It wasn’t until the classroom discussion that I had any clue that there was more to the book than the story. We didn’t have the internet so any sort of analysis had to come from sources like Cliff Notes that you had to find and buy if you were so inclined.

I really didn’t appreciate what we read in that class. From the titles that I remember, it was Canterbury Tales, Gulliver’s Travels and Moby Dick to name a few. None of them I cared for. Thirty years post, I thought that maybe I could give Dante another shot. From what I remember of his work, I thought that I could find some common ground between what I do and what he did.

I am here to say that my memory failed me. What I thought I knew was wrong. I was thinking that Dante took more of a biblical approach rather than a mythological and personal one. Were I to do it all over again, I would probably have skipped this one and left it in the memory hole because I am more than sure that I don’t agree with Dante’s view of the afterworld.

We are going to go on to Purgatory because I said so. That being said, I am not holding out any hope that this will work out any more favorably than it has so far. I won’t say that I hated the book, I didn’t. It is disappointing that it is not what I thought I was doing. That is hard to come back from.

The monsters, creatures and tortures were fun. I give Dante credit for what he did and then adding a personal vendetta to the whole thing. I have come to understand that Dante had some monastic training and this played strongly into the whole story. But to the accuracy and the theological logic was pretty shaky in my opinion.

In general, I think society’s mores have changed a lot since the 1300s. I suspect that disconnect makes me not empathize nearly as strongly with the crimes and punishments. According to common law (English middle ages in origin), we rank crimes against people over crimes against property. Then we still also have some Puritan in us so we have crimes against ourselves or so called victimless crimes. If I read things right, Dante puts hypocrisy (regardless of the victim) over murder and graft; something that we don’t give a second thought about.

It does remain to be seen that sin and crime are not synonymous. In a world created by god, in his image for us to spend eternity with him, it is hard to appreciate heresy being smaller sin than hypocrisy. Adam was created to be a friend of God, how is it possible that God’s betrayal be worse than man’s? I mean that the whole hierarchy made little to no sense to me other than gross categories.

Moving forward, as a protestant I don’t jive with Purgatory. It is not something that I believe nor have I invested much energy into learning about it. From what I have ascertained so far, Purgatory is a place to atone for sins before you can ascend to Heaven. It also appears that some of the same sins in Hell are also found in Purgatory. Next week it will be the first nine Cantos in Purgatory.

End Your Programming Routine: I don’t mean to be down on Dante, we just don’t believe the same things. We also come from different times and cultures. If you haven’t read the Inferno, it is a must read to round you out as a person, not to give you insight into the afterlife. This is fiction and entertainment just like “The Good Place“. Just keep that in perspective.

March 15, 2024 – The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Canto XXXII – XXXIV

March 15, 2024 /

Finally, we made it to the bottom and it is only uphill from here. Interestingly enough, hell is frozen rather than flame filled. I suppose to me, it is fitting. I find cold to be worse than heat any day. Especially when we are talking true pain, cold is much more painful. Heat makes me lethargic and maybe even moody, but not painful like cold.

Deadliest catch is on right now. They talk about -30 degrees with the wind blowing and all wet. I honestly don’t think I can do that. I remember taking shifts at the Christmas tree lot. I was bundled up and sitting in front of a space heater to have my feet numb from the cold. I guess that is why I work in front of a computer all day.

It turns out that the worst level of hell is the compound fraudsters. To be one hundred percent honest I didn’t see a lot of difference between what happened on other levels and this one. Dante talks about several occurrences of a character that lures a group of individuals to dinner and then kills them all.

I guess to me, luring them to death and killing them isn’t any different than stabbing them in the back when they aren’t looking. I guess you had to be there. In the three levels of circle nine, each of the characters were a bit more frozen. In level one, the characters are frozen up to the neck. In the second level, their heads are frozen face down. I the third level, they are completely encased into the ice.

On the second level, there was a long story about a man and his sons who were imprisoned and ultimately starved to death. The father and the captor were frozen close enough whereby the father could bite the captor, a nod to his starvation. I am not sure the sins of the father to be honest but for some reason this situation drew a lot of condemnation from Dante.

Satan is where you would expect, at the very bottom. Here is out look at him. Satan is frozen solid. He has three faces, Judas, Brutus and Cassius (more on that in a minute). He has wings and is hairy.

I find the three faces of Satan very interesting. Judas’ face is flanked on either side by Cassius and Brutus. These were two senators involved in the plot to assassinate Julius Caesar. As an Italian, I suppose Dante’s Roman history was in his blood so to speak. That being said, In this era of city states I wonder about Dante’s affinity for Rome. It would be like us Americans reminiscing about King George III or something.

I think that I have to take issue with Judas. First of all, I understand that Judas betrayed Jesus. That being said, without the crucifixion of Jesus, we would not have redemption. I would say his actions were fundamental to Christianity. Second, Jesus know he was going to be betrayed by Judas, it was all part of the plan.

Allegedly, the devil was a fallen angel that fell into disfavor with god. As a matter of fact, the original serpent from Genesis was the devil. Therefore, I say Satan predates the beginning of man and earth. So, I guess that I am going to disagree with Dante on the theology of the devil.

In order to leave hell, Dante and Virgil have to crawl over and down the Devil. Apparently, there is a hole underneath him that straddles Hell and Purgatory. When they cross over, it is described as going from night to day. The hole apparently goes through the center of the earth hence the difference in daylight.

End Your Programming Routine: I am happy to to be moving on. It is depressing to spend life in Hell. I appreciate the ice setting and the gruesome torture. I have no idea what to expect in purgatory. I am definitely going to have words to say when I wrap up next week. So, I will save it for then.

March 12, 2024 – Convoy

March 12, 2024 /

There were some pretty campy movies in the 1970s. Believe it or not, I don’t think Convoy was one of them. Yes, it has some cheesy action and some CB jibber, jabber and the plot was a little thin, but the subplot was subversively amazing. In fact, so good that I don’t think they even realized what they had done.

Convoy was a movie released in 1978 based on the song by CW McCall in 1974. The embedded video is a modified version of the original song which is the opening of the movie. The movie stars Kris Kristofferson as a truck driver who inadvertently leads a group of trucks on a convoy that is essentially trying to escape a dirty sheriff.

This movie is currently playing on Pluto. If you have internet access, then you can also watch the movie for free. My wife was gone for the weekend and I turned this on while I was cooking in the kitchen. I soon found that I was too invested in the story that I needed to finish it.

The night before, I was watching James Caan as The Gambler (1974). I fell asleep before the movie was over so I wanted to watch the last twenty minutes. I saw that Convoy was coming up next. As a fan of The Dukes of Hazzard and Smokey and the Bandit, I figured I was going to like this and I wasn’t dissapointed.

I am not a trucker and I don’t know any. I really don’t get what a convoy actually does other than it is pretty menacing seeing a whole line of trucks bearing down on you. But, I think this movie has inspired a genre of protest whereby truckers impede goods movement or traffic. The last, most famous one in recent memory was the Canadian trucker strike of 2022 over requiring vaccinations for Covid-19.

Known by the CB handle ‘Rubber Duck’ (Kristofferson) or more commonly Duck, realizes that the only way out of his predicament is by driving to Mexico. This draws a lot of support from close by truckers who join up in the convoy. This in turn creates a regional sensation with the public. Remember, we only had three TV stations in those days.

What makes this movie great is that the New Mexico governor tries to coopt the public sentiment and support for the truckers into helping his campaign for senate. There it is, the ugly gold nugget. The people were largely oblivious as they are involved in the party of it all. Meanwhile, Duck and the other truckers could see right through it. There was a lot of political babble from the governor about feeling the pain and taking action with the people.

This is the where we stand. As an example, as soon as the politicians took hold of the tea party, it died. A leader has to be ambivalent of the details and aloof of the results to be effective. We used to call that integrity or doing the right thing for the right reasons. When you have a stake in the results, now all of the sudden the purity of the movement is compromised and the absolutism of right and wrong become subjective. As long as we have lessor of two evils as our choices, it will never work.

End Your Programming Routine: Look beyond some of the antics, this is a great movie. As a matter of fact, there was a time when people believed that legal didn’t equate to right. It took me a long time to get there, but I am here now. Sure, maybe there were other problems around like equality but we are quickly becoming equal slaves.

March 8, 2024 – The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Canto XVIII – XXXI

March 8, 2024 /

We did it! This week was a slog. I had hours and hours into reading and re-reading to try and keep up with the continuity and understand what was happening. Thank goodness for the summary before each Canto started because in some cases, I wouldn’t know what was happening.

Sometimes I read the text and then I go back to the summary and wonder, how in the world did the author come to that conclusion based on what I read? Lost in translation I guess. In this section in particular, there were numerous notes saying ‘this isn’t exactly how it was written and here is the exact translation. This didn’t make sense, so I translated it as such…’.

I appreciate that actually. While maybe not the version of the text that we would want to use for research, I appreciate someone taking the initiative of this is more in the spirit of what is going on. As long as it is noted in places that were modified, we are free to form our own opinion by reading middle age Italian :).

This section is over 100 pages in my book, so I am not going to be able to go too deep into all the sins. What was noted by the translator and I have come to enjoy is the punishment is related to the crime. For instance the grafters were perpetually submerged in boiling pitch. The pitch represents the sticky hands in the living world. The thieves morph back and forth between reptilian figures because people who steal are snakes.

I think when I look at this section in the light of modern terms, I have to think that there is too many divisions of sin in hell. We have the Simoniacs (which I had to look up the definition) who are people that used their position to sell influence. As you would expect, this was largely church administrators and politicians. Then you have the Hypocrites who do one thing and say another. But the worse of them all is the Falsifiers. Honestly, I have a hard time distinguishing one sin from the other, they all seem intertwined to me.

Speaking of Falsifiers, there were three distinct categories with the worst of the worse being the Alchemist. Maybe as a scientist I don’t see a big deal. I theorize that alchemy was a crime against nature and therefore a crime against god. I also suppose that maybe they were considered cheats which clearly holds more wrath than crimes of passion in Dante’s time. But really, alchemy is one of the worst crimes known to man?

This section more than any has a lot of obscure references. To date there has been a lot of Greek and Roman mythology that I have struggled with. The characters are slightly familiar but their back story is basically a blank to me. Many of the previous levels are heavily referenced in those common stories. In this level, there are so many interactions with contemporaries that it makes it really hard to follow. It paints a picture that as Dante’s wrath goes, so do the characters that he perceived wronged him get more detailed and deeper in hell.

I can understand that, I fact I think that it is brilliant. I am going to write a comedy making fun of my enemies. The more angry I am at them, the worse their situation is going to be in the story. All the while, I am not committing any actual sin because it is art, fiction, its entertainment. The only problem is that if you are 700 years removed from Florence, it is hard to get the jokes.

Next week, I will be finishing The Inferno. We are about to find out who is going to be at the same scale as the devil. The following week, I am going to an analysis of the Inferno and then we will be into Purgatory and ascending toward Heaven for the remainder of the book. So, after this very heavy week of reading, things are going to get a lot easier and then a break.

End Your Programming Routine: What I take away from this week is that this is clearly a story of Dante using a heavenly setting, not a heavenly story with contemporary characters. The latter reason was why I started down this journey in the first place, but I am committed now so we are going to find out who Dante holds next to the Devil and who is next to God. It definitely will effect my final opinion and recommendation of the Devine Comedy, but it is nice to know.

March 5, 2024 – Review: The Boys In The Boat

March 5, 2024 /

“The boys in the hood are always hard. Come talking that trash they pull your card…” Remember that song? Well, the boys in the boat are also pretty hard. Coming of age in the Great Depression and participating in grueling work-outs in terrible weather kind of makes my bones chill. You might have seen the movie, I haven’t yet but it is on my shortlist just to complete this story.

The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown is a non-fiction story about the University of Washington crew team striving for 1936 Olympic gold. It is more or less focused on a couple of people. Al Ulbrickson is the Washington coach, George Pocock is a boat builder and unofficial consultant and rower Joe Rantz from birth to winning the gold medal in 1936.

Joe is the book’s major character. He had an amazing and heartbreaking, hardscrabble upbringing. The death of his mother and the cold shoulder of his step mother left him alone in his high school years. It is impressive that despite the cruelty of the period, Joe was able to hustle to the point that he could get into the university and stay there.

The first third of the book was the history of the three primary characters. The second half of the book was the ebb and flow of the crew team. Finally, the last fifteen percent or so was the Olympic tribulations. An interesting aspect of the book was the parallel Nazi story where the Olympics were used to deceive the rest of the world of the building evil. Short anecdotes were added about the propaganda setup that was part of the effort.

This was a book that I got for Christmas. It came as a a recommendation from a friend of my mom. I had no idea that there was a coming movie or that this story was becoming a phenomenon. Since I read almost everything put in front of me, I went ahead and dove into the book. That being said, I will offer my analysis now.

Since I haven’t seen the movie, I am going to have to speculate here. Usually I am a book over movie person. That may be because I usually read the book long before seeing the movie. I have to wonder in this case if this is a movie before the book. The reason I say this is because the book is wildly detailed. This is a long, almost 400 page story for the quest. I suspect that the same effect could have been achieved at half the volume of words.

I really enjoyed the backstory of Joe Rantz. The following chapters of the ups and downs of the crew seasons and constitution of the team got quite nuanced and drawn out. While the title is Boys in the Boat, there really was not much back story or focus on any of the other boys other than Joe. I think if I was the editor, I would have refocused the entire story, including the title on Joe.

While I found the Nazi component intriguing, this comes off as a thinly cloaked, pro-USA propaganda story of its own. We have the Germans giving their own team the best lane while the pure grit Americans win despite being put at a disadvantage proving that we were the divinely favored ones.

Was the story worth the effort? I would have to say that if you are a UW fan, a rower or a non-specific history buff then yes, but otherwise no. The human interest is really in the character Joe Rantz and the amazing feats that he did to survive and thrive. It is hard to understand the perspective of the privileged Yale, Harvard or Cornell versus hoping to eat daily Washington team. So, it is a common man triumph that could get the same effect in a novelette or magazine article.

About five years ago, my sister got her PhD from University of Washington. On that day, we walked down to Lake Washington and walked right next to the very boathouse that still remains. My brother-in-law pointed out the cut and the basic layout of the area. I had no idea that there was a story there or that one day I would see a picture in a book of that very building.

End Your Programming Routine: I was instantly drawn in to the first picture of the boathouse. I stayed interested in the early life of Joe. Once the book got into the grind of the journey, I lost a lot of enthusiasm for the rest of the story. It has an exciting ending with a photo finish but you could look that up. This is a story that doesn’t have enough meat to read the whole book. No disrespect to Mr Brown, I think it was meticulously researched by evidence of its length. My suggestion is to reformat the story to the title ‘A Boy in the Boat’.