The Boys in the Boat: book review

Book Review: THE BOYS IN THE BOAT by Daniel James Brown, Penguin publ 2013

This is a true story from the years of the Great Depression—the 1930s—when many honest men and women had to struggle to survive without a job. At the age of fifteen, Joe Rantz stood in his family's farmyard near Sequim, Washington, and watched his family drive away, leaving him behind.

His father said, while his step-mother waited in the car with her two small sons, “The thing is, Son, Thula [Joe's step-mom] wants you to stay here. I would stay with you, but I can't. The little kids are going to need a father more than you are. You're pretty much all grown up now anyway. You have to learn to be happy on your own.” With that, Dad drove the family away. The scene had taken only five minutes.

As a child, Joe had moved often, when mechanic's jobs led his father from mining camp to lumber mill to hard-scrabble farm in western Washington State. Now, Joe learned to survive for himself. He continued in high school, learned to poach salmon from the Dungeness River while evading the game warden, scavenging the forest for edibles, helping an elderly neighbor. Playing guitar in honky-tonk bands. Working on a WPA crew laying asphalt on a highway. Operating a 75-lb pneumatic drill while suspended over a 200-foot cliff at the Grand Coulee Dam site, because that job paid 75 cents an hour instead of the standard rate of 50 cents.

Several other paths converged upon Joe's life: his older brother, a high school teacher in Seattle, who advised Joe to transfer to a city high school. The rowing crew coach at the University of Washington who came recruiting when Joe happened to be working out in the high school gym. A woodworker who emigrated from Britain to find more scope for his skills in Seattle, and who fell in love with the qualities of Washington's red cedar trees. A sixteen-year-old girl in Sequim who fell in love with her independent, self-confidant classmate, and followed him to college. A German dictator who decreed a huge athletic complex to host the 1936 Olympic Games and show the whole world the absolute superiority of Gemany's Third Reich. And several dozen young men whose aim was victory in the world's oldest athletic sport. Rowing a boat. 

Racing in a two-feet-wide, sixty-two-feet-long cedar wood shell as part of a coordinated team of eight oarsmen and a coxswain is an incredibly demanding physical and mental task. Not only is there no stopping to rest during a four-mile race, a rower's mind must focus entirely inside his boat, paying attention only to the commands of the coxswain, and never deviating from the in-unison rhythm of the team. Eight oar blades must immerse to the same depth, at the same instant, over and over and over. Physical pain, rain, snow or sweltering heat must be ignored. Only when all nine men are “in swing”---perfect coordination—is there any hope of winning. That takes long practice, under the watchful, intelligent eye of an experienced coach who can detect moods, illness, and other distractions.

After three years of training under freshman coach Tom Bolles and varsity coach Al Ulbrickson, Joe Rantz's performance was still spotty. Then master woodworker George Pocock invited Joe to visit his workshop and watch him work on the racing boats while they talked. Gradually Joe began to understand the difference between being totally self-reliant and being part of a team. The University of Washington's team swept all three races at the national competition in the summer of 1936, and moved onward to Adolf Hitler's Germany to represent USA at the 1936 Olympics.

Three chapters near the end of the book detail the team's experiences in Germany, with photographs both by American reporters and by Leni Riefenstahl, whom Hitler had personally commissioned to document the anticipated victories of the Third Reich. A thousand extra words here could not do justice to the stresses and emotional high points of Joe Rantz and his team mates in those weeks in Germany, both on the Olympic sports field and among the German people.

Brown's research and story-telling talents paint a vivid account of the Depression years and build-up to World War Two, through both anecdotes and photographs. A gripping tale.