“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’.