Play Book Tag discussion

In The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Daniel James Brown explores an extraordinary moment in forgotten sports history. During the 1920s and 1930s, college crew teams were incredibly popular, ranking as high as football and baseball do now. One of the most popular rivalries was between the strongest Western teams, the University of Washington and the University of California at Berkeley.

The author explores the backstory of many of the key players in this rivalry but focuses on one specific member of the Washington crew team, Joe Rantz. After his mother dies of cancer and his father and new stepmother abandon him, he does everything he can to stay alive. Eventually he will take some of the worst jobs available during the Depression to try to keep himself in food, shelter, and college. His future wife, Joyce, is also a key part of the story. We also get to know George Yeoman Pocock, a renowned British oarsman who emigrates to Washington and sculpts unequaled shells of native red cedar in his workshop at the university boathouse. One of my favorite characters was 'the ninth man' Bobby Moch, the brilliant coxswain, who fearlessly holds back his crew to 29 or 32 strokes per minute, before unleashing them for sprinting victories.

"The Boys in the Boat" is a surprisingly suspenseful tale of team-winning camaraderie and triumph. It's an absorbing, sometimes thrilling piece of history that will appeal to a wider audience than sports fans. In many ways it reminds me of Laura Hillenbrand's "Seabiscuit." Set in one of America's worst times, the courage of the young crew team will make you cheer.

I agree, I never would have read this except that a book group chose it a few years ago. I had zero interest in or knowledge of rowing teams, but the book was wonderful. The incidents in Joe's life were so amazing I wouldn't have believed them if the book were fictional. There were so many stories of the different characters. It even made the building of the boat interesting.

A couple years later, the author was receiving a local award of some kind in Washington State and another recipient was a Japanese-American man from the era of the internment camps and the heroic company in Italy. He asked Brown to write their story and Facing the Mountain: A True Story of Japanese American Heroes in World War II was also a terrific book.

Great review. This was a surprise for me too.

I loved this book and highly recommend Facing the Mountain: A True Story of Japanese American Heroes in World War II.

Joanne wrote: "I loved this book and highly recommend Facing the Mountain: A True Story of Japanese American Heroes in World War II."

Thanks! I can't ever have a big enough WW2 library. I added this and it looks like a different perspective of the war.

It is very different. I learned a lot reading it, and I, too, read a lot of WWII. This was something new to me, and I was shocked that I had never learned about some of it

I already had Facing the Mountain on the TBR, but it was buried. Thanks for the reminder. I remember that the history of that unit forms a section of Michener's Hawaii. It's an amazing story.